Compaq Armada E500 notebook and 2.6.x kernels

Compaq Armada E500 notebook and 2.6.x kernels

[Gábor Lénárt]

Hello,

Sorry, maybe it's an OT here but I'm out of ideas (including google). My
problem is our Compaq Armada E500. It worked quite well with 2.4.x kernels.
However with 2.6.x kernels it always freezes. No log or opps, and the exact
time of freezing varies but it seems it has some connection with accessing
the sound hardware and/or pcmcia. But not always. I've tried everything,
disabling/enabling apic, and dozens of combinations of kernel parameters
from various sources with no solution ... It renders this notebook unusable
for us, since distribution(s) we wanted to use already changed from 2.4.x
kernels to 2.6. Is there ANY ideas? On request I can send various
information on this notebook, but at the moment I can't. Thanx in advance.

- Gábor

Re: Compaq Armada E500 notebook and 2.6.x kernels

[Stefan Seyfried]

Gábor Lénárt wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Sorry, maybe it's an OT here but I'm out of ideas (including google). My
> problem is our Compaq Armada E500. It worked quite well with 2.4.x kernels.
> However with 2.6.x kernels it always freezes. No log or opps, and the exact

> from various sources with no solution ... It renders this notebook unusable
> for us, since distribution(s) we wanted to use already changed from 2.4.x
> kernels to 2.6. Is there ANY ideas? On request I can send various
> information on this notebook, but at the moment I can't. Thanx in advance.

I have two E500's at hand, one is mission critical (my wife's :-) and
both run fine since 2.6.0test-days. The only minor problems i had were
the touchpad misdetected in early 2.6 (long since fixed) and one time,
when i had something that smelled awfully like memory corruption after
ACPI suspend to RAM, but that one never happened again.

Note that E500 apparently come in many different "flavors", i have one
P3-800 and one P3-650 and they need e.g. different module parameters to
get speedstep going.

My experience is almost exclusively with suse-patched kernels, but i do
not remember putting any band-aids for the E500 into those.

Are you running with APM or ACPI? Mine are running with ACPI since at
least 18 month with everything (suspend etc) working out of the box.
-- 
Stefan Seyfried, QA / R&D Team Mobile Devices, SUSE LINUX Nürnberg.

"Any ideas, John?"
"Well, surrounding them's out."

Re: Compaq Armada E500 notebook and 2.6.x kernels

[Benoît Rouits]

hi Gábor,
I recently installed a 2.6.10 and 2.6.11 kernel on my laptop and they
froze about 5 minutes after booting. My solution was to give those 2
options to the kernels:
lilo boot: mykernel noapic nolapic
apic and Local apic are Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller
I don't know why the local aic doesn't works in Sempron..

My laptop is an HP/Compaq with an AMD Sempron inside and a phoenix bios
HTH,
--
ben

Re: Compaq Armada E500 notebook and 2.6.x kernels

[Gábor Lénárt]

On Sun, May 01, 2005 at 04:15:04PM +0200, Benoît Rouits wrote:
> I recently installed a 2.6.10 and 2.6.11 kernel on my laptop and they
> froze about 5 minutes after booting. My solution was to give those 2
> options to the kernels:
> lilo boot: mykernel noapic nolapic
> apic and Local apic are Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller

Thanks. I know what apic and acpi means :) The problem that I tried these
as well. Some combination seems work well, but eg a day later, booting with
them cause freeze again. Nothing works after this point, I need to pull
out and then puch back the battery to do ANYTHING with the frozen notebook.

- Gábor