Paul Goyette said:

>Hmmm.  Just as another data point, I committed heresy and
>installed FreeBSD 6.1Beta4, using their boot-time option
>to disable ACPI.  The install went to completion, although
>there are other issues I have yet to debug (some problems
>interacting with my USB-aware KVM switch).

The first box that I installed NetBSD/amd64 has a Gigabyte GA-K8N51GMF-9
motherboard, which has an nforce4 chipset. No switch for ACPI in the BIOS.

I installed NetBSD, and it didn't understand the network an X didn't understand
the video hardware. It also didn't grok the SATA controller, and used it in
legacy IDE. That was with 3.0 - it worked better with -current and a ATI
Radeon 9250 controller. The main reason that I installed Solaris on the box
is that there are very few applications that will build on NetBSD/amd64.

So I have that box running Solaris 10 x86.Solaris has a switch to turn off
ACPI at boot, and the box is stable.

I have now built up a second box with an ASUS A8V motherboard.I'm running
with ACPI turned on with a GENERIC.MP kernel. NetBSD/i386. It's a screamer
with an x2 processor. I'm running i386 because I need applications, I'm sure
it would run NetBSD/amd64 just fine. I'm planning to build an identical box
to run 64bit NetBSD.

Back to the Gigabyte board - even nvidia's latest patches for Solaris 10 x86
don't fix the problems with video, etc. 

>Any chance of getting an equivalent option in NetBSD (to
>disable ACPI)?

It would be useful.
-- 
Rick Kelly	rmk@rmkhome.com
		<http://www.rmkhome.com/>
		<http://rkba.rmkhome.com/>