Date: Wed, 19 Aug 1998 09:37:39 -0700 (PDT) From: Tom Bartol <bartol@salk.edu> To: Doug White <dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu> Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: ThinkPad 770 hangs during boot -- available memory probe problem? (was: trouble with sio on Thinkpad 770) Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980818152537.12654E-100000@cole.salk.edu> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.00.9808141530100.13156-100000@resnet.uoregon.edu>
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Hi again, It looks as though there may be a problem with the way FreeBSD determines the amount of available memory at boot-up time (at least on my ThinkPad 770) --or-- that the latest 770 BIOS is not reporting the correct value. I'm hoping someone might be able to help me narrow down the problem so that we can either fix FreeBSD or give IBM useful details about their BIOS problem. Here's the background which leads me to this conclusion: I started the day with a ThinkPad 770 (96MB RAM) running 2.2.6-RELEASE and PAO. Everything worked perfectly except that the kernel did not find any sio devices at boot time. I wanted to get the serial port working. The serial patch suggested below did not help. Upgrading to 2.2.7 did help some except that the kernel reported that it found an 8250 instead of a 16550A for sio0. At this point I suspected a possible BIOS problem and I had heard that there had been several updates to the 770 BIOS recently. I had been meaning to do this at some point anyhow so I decided this would be a good time to do it (on the principle that if ain't broke don't fix it and if it is broke then do). The BIOS update went smoothly and I could still boot into Win95 just fine. However, when I tried to boot into 2.2.7 the system hung during boot sometime after probing for the IDE devices (the kernel did correctly recognize sio0 as a 16550A, so at least I accomplished that part of my goal). After getting over my initial shock and horror I began the calm, cool work of investigating the problem. Sparing you the pain of a blow-by-blow account of everything I tried I should say that I determined I could boot my system with older versions of 2.2.X and 3.0. I had lent my old copy of 2.2.5-RELEASE to a friend but I did have a boot and fixit floppy lying around for 2.2-960801-SNAP and a bootable CDROM of 3.0-970807-SNAP. Both of these would boot my system but 2.2.6-RELEASE, 2.2.7-RELEASE, 3.0-19980804-SNAP would all hang during boot. Even the visual config menu did not save me from a hang. So I installed 3.0-970807-SNAP. I could now boot my system. I then configured a custom kernel with this system and after more investigative work found that if I set MAXMEM = (96*1024) in the kernel config file (recall that these older systems still required the MAXMEM parameter for >64MB to be recognized) then my system would hang on boot, but if I set MAXMEM = (95*1024) everything works perfectly, even the serial port. :-) I guess that more recent kernels can somehow get the correct available memory value on their own by some means (perhaps from the BIOS) and that this algorithm works for some BIOSes but not others and could be fixed to work with the new BIOS I installed on my 770, or perhaps the 770 BIOS is not reporting the correct value when probed by FreeBSD. So, the question is: what's going here and what should I do to help narrow it down further so that the appropriate action can be taken. Thanks much! Tom On Fri, 14 Aug 1998, Doug White wrote: > > On Fri, 14 Aug 1998, Tom Bartol wrote: > > > When I boot my Thinkpad 770 running 2.2.6-RELEASE boot-up process > > reports "sio0 not found at 0x3f8" and similar for sio1. Does anyone know > > why this would be so and how I might diagnose and fix the problem? I'm > > running a kernel I built from a config file based on GENERIC. The lines > > of the config file refering to the sio devices have not been modifed from > > those in GENERIC. I get the same results when I boot kernel.GENERIC. > > Try 2.2.7 or the patches at http://www.lemis.com/serial-port-patch.html > > Doug White | University of Oregon > Internet: dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu | Residence Networking Assistant > http://gladstone.uoregon.edu/~dwhite | Computer Science Major > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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