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Subject: Re: APM oops with Dell 5000e laptop
From: Brad Douglas <brad@neruo.com>
To: Dax Kelson <dax@gurulabs.com>
Cc: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
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Date: 17 Nov 2000 04:08:55 +0800
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> 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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