Re: The imperfect beauty of NetBSD [Was: NetBSD vs. FreeBSD]

[Alex Goncharov <alex-goncharov%comcast.net@localhost>]

,--- You/Matthias (Tue, 5 Jan 2010 17:32:54 +0100) ----*
| alex-goncharov%comcast.net@localhost said:
| > ACPI Error: No handler for Region [ERAM] (0xffff800007b1ef00)
| > [EmbeddedControl] (20090730/evregion-430)
| 
| The handler for the "EmbeddedControl" space is provided by the
| "acpiec" driver. Your summary doesn't give any indication that
| one was attached. This could be part of the problem.
| Whether not configured or not probed correctly... I can't tell
| about this driver's quality, none of my boxes uses an embedded
| controller.
| An ACPI DSDT table dump could be helpful.

Thank you: over the next few days, I am planning to attempt a BIOS
upgrade and enter a PR with an ACPI dump (I'll "man" for how to do
such dumps but if anybody has a specific recommendation, please let me
know.)

Another thing about ACPI in NetBSD that bothers me: "halt -p" not
always powers off a computer.

I *think* I didn't forget the `-p' option to `halt' last night --
still, the machine was halted without switching off.

This is not unusual for this laptop -- OpenSolaris *never* was able to
power it off (with "poweroff" command).

But this is also not unusual for NetBSD: I have an about one-year-old
desktop with four disk BIOS partitions divided between FreeBSD and
NetBSD, both of the i386 and amd64 varieties.

FreeBSD will never fail to power off that system on `halt -p'.

NetBSD (5.0.1) will sometimes do it, sometimes not: while not totally
deterministic, the chances to be powered off are close to 1 when `halt
-p' is issued on the console, and 0 when the command is entered via an
xterm (displayed on another system).

-- Alex -- alex-goncharov%comcast.net@localhost --