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SubjectRe: Laptops (APM) & 0040 crashes
I tested this patch and it works! Without this patch, I was unable to
enable the APM support on my Acer-Notebook. The only solution was flashing
the bios with a hacked version...

Dear Linus!

Please include this patch in 2.0.34 and the 2.1.x-series. It can be found
at

http://www.linuxmama.com/20-bugfix.html#apm-0x40-fix

You just have to remove the 'init/patches'-directory.

Kurt

On 2 Feb 1998, John Goerzen wrote:
> Thanks everyone for your replies on this issue.
> Stephen.Rothwell@canb.auug.org.au writes:
>
> > > The other day, I reported to linux-kernel a kernel oops in 2.0.33 that
> > > was a protection fault at 0040 during boot. Upon further
> > > investigation, it appears that the Debian boot disks do not suffer
> > > from this problem.
> > They probably don't have APM enabled in their kernel.
>
> Correct. Which is probably not a good thing, since a lot of desktop
> machines especially annoyingly ship with power management turned on,
> and can do nasty things to Linux like turn off the CPU when there's no
> keyboard activity for a certain amount of time. I've had
> installations botched by this before, and have just turned off power
> management in the desktop's BIOS.
>
> Laptops are not quite so easy to deal with -- power management is
> vital to a laptop and it must be supported by the OS, or the OS will
> not be very useful on the laptop.
>
> > > machines also don't have compliant BIOSes, and this driver will
> > > cause those machines to panic during the boot phase (typically,
> > > these machines are using a data segment of 0040, which is reserved
> > > for the Linux kernel). If you get random kernel OOPSes that don't
> >
> > The message above is a little misleading, the real point is that
> > the BIOS is using data segment 0x40 which is not a valid segment
> > descriptor for Linux. It is a valid segment offset in real mode,
> > but Linux is running in protected mode where access to this value
> > as a segment descriptor is illegal. The BIOS is buggy!
>
> OK, well I can't claim to know a lot about x86 protected mode
> architecture (my only assembly experience has been DOS real mode).
> But here's another interesting tidbit of information. After I finally
> just couldn't make Linux go on there like I wanted (esp. hibernate
> function, which is important to me for a laptop), I decided to try out
> FreeBSD -- I need some sort of Unix, preferably Linux, but I figured
> FreeBSD may work. I grabbed the FreeBSD+PAO boot/install disk (PAO is
> FreeBSD's laptop support system). It worked perfectly -- detected
> APM, PCMCIA, etc. And hibernate works.
>
> I really prefer to work in Linux but I'm leaving FreeBSD on there for
> the moment since I have no better option right now. Anyway, it seems
> that FreeBSD is somehow getting around this problem. What I don't
> know is HOW they are getting around it. I am not a kernel hacker so I
> unfortunately won't be much use analyzing their code, but I can try and
> find their APM code and mail it to anybody interested.
>
> > OK, there is not much work going on with the APM driver for various
> > reasons - the biggy being that APM is now defunct :-( There is a new
>
> Hmm, weird. AFAIK, all current laptops still use APM.
>
> > API for doing power management that I know nothing about (yet). Also
> > there have not been any major revisions of teh APM BIOS specifiation anyway.
>
> It seems, though, that some support for certain "buggy" BIOSes might be
> warranted. (Like is present for CMS640, etc.) I much perfer
> my Debian to FreeBSD :-)
>
> > I think the only solution is to complain to IBM and get it fixed.
> > There may already be an updated BIOS available (I don't know).
>
> I have looked at their webpage and they apparently do have a BIOS
> update. Looking at their changelog, they do not say that they have
> dealt with an issue like this, but it is possible that they did and
> just didn't mention it. I will flash the image this afternoon and let
> everyone know how it works.
>
> Even if it works, I would still say that it might be beneficial to
> adopt whatever workaround FreeBSD is using for this bug. From my
> limited understanding of it, it may prove useful for desktop machines
> with APM support as well.
>
> Thanks for the info.
>
> John Goerzen
>


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