Re: "Latitude with broken BIOS" ?

[Alessandro Suardi <ALESSANDRO.SUARDI@oracle.com>]

Mikael Pettersson wrote:

> Alessandro Suardi wrote:
>
> > > Your P4-based Latitude probably has a different BIOS than the buggy
> > > P3-based ones, and it may work better. Try commenting out the
> > > local_apic_kills_bios entry for "Dell Latitude" at around line 692
> > > in arch/i386/kernel/dmi_scan.c and rebuild the kernel. If it
> > 
> > (ahem) I had tried that in 2.5.58 already ;)
> > 
> > However I rebuilt 2.5.59 with that change, and I'm not going further:
> > 
> >  No local APIC present or hardware disabled
>
> Ah, your P4 needs another patch. Edit arch/i386/kernel/apic.c, function
> detect_init_APIC(), at line 631, and remove the "&& cpu_has_apic" after
> the "boot_cpu_data.x86 == 15" test. (Or check if your BIOS can be set up
> to boot with the local APIC enabled.)
>
> /Mikael

The BIOS doesn't seem to have any such option... and the code change
 does exactly what you imagined - pull the power cord, instant hang.

It seems even BIOS A05 of the C640 is legitimately blacklisted :(


Thanks, ciao,

--alessandro