Re: APM oops with Dell 5000e laptop

From: Brad Douglas (brad@neruo.com)
Date: Thu Nov 16 2000 - 15:08:55 EST


> Alan Cox said once upon a time (Thu, 16 Nov 2000):
>
> > > I just got a Sceptre 6950 (also known as a Dell 5000e), I just installed
> > > Red Hat 7.0 on it, and got an APM related oops at boot.
> >
> > Yep. This is not a Linux problem
>
> The kernel works around/ignores/disables other broken hardware or broken
> features of otherwise working hardware with black lists. There will be
> many *many* of these laptops sold.

Unlike other BIOS, this cannot be fixed up and I don't believe there is an easy way to identify every single "version" of this machine (Stephen Rothwell, can you comment here?).
That broken call is a major part of the Linux APM system. The simplest (and arguably, best) solution is to just not compile it into the kernel or add "apm=off" to lilo.conf until the problem is fixed.

> Is there a way to uniquely identify the affected BIOSes at boot time and
> turn off APM? According to Brad Douglas, the 32-bit Get Power Status
> (0AH) call is broken.

I do not believe so. I tend to think that detecting these broken models is a waste of kernel code (especially, if there's an effort to correct the problem).

> Supposedly there will be a BIOS update in the "future" to correct this
> problem.

This is what we have been led to believe. I have no ETA at this time.

Brad Douglas
brad@neruo.com
brad@tuxtops.com

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