inspiron 8100 freezing

inspiron 8100 freezing

[Ian Eure]

Hi there. My shiny new Dell Inspiron 8100 arrived in the mail today... Wiped 
Windows XP, installed Debian, and compiled myself a 2.4.17 kernel w/herick's 
IDE patch.

However, the system locks hard when I boot it up. The point where it dies 
varies - it got as far as starting cron one time.

Compiled a vanilla 2.4.17 & got the exact same thing. I'm not doing anything 
exotic.

ACPI is disabled, APM is configured thusly:

CONFIG_APM=y
# CONFIG_APM_IGNORE_USER_SUSPEND is not set
CONFIG_APM_DO_ENABLE=y
CONFIG_APM_CPU_IDLE=y
CONFIG_APM_DISPLAY_BLANK=y
CONFIG_APM_RTC_IS_GMT=y
# CONFIG_APM_ALLOW_INTS is not set
# CONFIG_APM_REAL_MODE_POWER_OFF is not set

The 2.2.20 kernel that Debian installed seems to work ok.

Anyone else seeing anything like this?

P.S. Please CC me on replies, I'm not subscribed. Thanks.

Re: inspiron 8100 freezing

[Mikael Pettersson]

On Wed, 13 Feb 2002 17:34:18 -0800, Ian Eure wrote:
>Hi there. My shiny new Dell Inspiron 8100 arrived in the mail today...
>...
>However, the system locks hard when I boot it up. The point where it dies 
>varies - it got as far as starting cron one time.
>
>Compiled a vanilla 2.4.17 & got the exact same thing. I'm not doing anything 
>exotic.
>
>ACPI is disabled, APM is configured thusly:

I bet you have CONFIG_SMP or CONFIG_X86_UP_APIC enabled. In that
case the hangs on the Inspiron are expected: it's BIOS is buggy.

A quick fix is to disable those two options. The proper fix is to
complain to Dell and tell them to fix their damn BIOS, then get a
2.4.18-pre or -rc kernel, and apply these patches

patch-boot-time-ioremap
patch-early-dmi-scan
patch-dmi-apic-fixups

from <http://www.csd.uu.se/~mikpe/linux/kernel-patches/2.4/>.

/Mikael

Re: inspiron 8100 freezing

[Thomas Langås]

Mikael Pettersson:
> I bet you have CONFIG_SMP or CONFIG_X86_UP_APIC enabled. In that
> case the hangs on the Inspiron are expected: it's BIOS is buggy.

Ok, what's wrong?  Just telling them something is wrong with their BIOS
doesn't do much good :)

-- 
Thomas

Re: inspiron 8100 freezing

[Tom Sightler]

> Mikael Pettersson:
> > I bet you have CONFIG_SMP or CONFIG_X86_UP_APIC enabled. In that
> > case the hangs on the Inspiron are expected: it's BIOS is buggy.
>
> Ok, what's wrong?  Just telling them something is wrong with their BIOS
> doesn't do much good :)

This seems to affect my Latitude C810 with the latest BIOS (A05).  When I
flashed to that version my linux system started handing at random spots.
Disabling CONFIG_X86_UP_APIC took care of the hangs, but I also lost all of
my battery status support (the batter would always say unknown).

I downgraded the system back to A04 and everything went back to normal.  So
I agree with this question, what's wrong with Dell's BIOS?  It seems that
whatever they do to get XP working breaks Linux badly.  I could complain,
but I'd need to be specific about what they are actually doing wrong.

Later,
Tom

Re: inspiron 8100 freezing

[Mikael Pettersson]

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On Thu, 14 Feb 2002 11:48:56 +0100, Thomas Langås wrote:
>Mikael Pettersson:
>> I bet you have CONFIG_SMP or CONFIG_X86_UP_APIC enabled. In that
>> case the hangs on the Inspiron are expected: it's BIOS is buggy.
>
>Ok, what's wrong?  Just telling them something is wrong with their BIOS
>doesn't do much good :)

The machine ships with a CPU containing a local APIC, but if
Linux enables it, the machine hangs when the BIOS is entered,
i.e. at power management events and entry to BIOS setup screens.

On other machines that don't hang, the BIOS either handles the
local APIC itself, or it invokes the kernel's APM callback which
disables the local APIC before e.g. doing a suspend.

/Mikael