Bug 5206

Summary:	acpi fails to blacklist ancient BIOS
Product:	ACPI	Reporter:	Andrew Morton (akpm)
Component:	Config-Other	Assignee:	acpi_aml-interpreter
Status:	REJECTED DOCUMENTED
Severity:	normal	CC:	acpi-bugzilla
Priority:	P2
Hardware:	i386
OS:	Linux
Kernel Version:	2.6.13-git8 (or thereabouts)	Subsystem:
Regression:	---	Bisected commit-id:
Attachments:	dmesg

Description Andrew Morton 2005-09-08 15:50:23 UTC

Most recent kernel where this bug did not occur: not sure yet
Distribution:
Hardware Environment:
Software Environment:
Problem Description:

Steps to reproduce: boot it.

I just fired up this really old quad Xeon server I have.  First time
I turned it on in a year.

It has a really old BIOS - 1999 or 2000.   ACPI used to disable
itself due to the age of the BIOS (I used to have to use acpi=force),
but it no longer does so.  ACPI now enables itself (without ACPI=force)
and, for other reasons, crashes.

It means that a vendor kernel won't work on this machine.

So.   What happened to the date-of-BIOS based ACPI blacklisting?

Comment 1 Andrew Morton 2005-09-08 15:52:36 UTC

Created attachment 5939 [details]
dmesg

dmesg

Comment 2 Len Brown 2005-09-14 19:52:32 UTC

Originally kernel.org didn't blacklist ACPI by BIOS date.
Then I swiped the year-cutoff date idea from SuSE, I used
#define ACPI_BLACKLIST_CUTOFF_YEAR 2001

For linux-2.6.9, I moved this policy decision to config time
via CONFIG_ACPI_BLACKLIST_YEAR.
The distros are free to choose their own policy by setting
the CONFIG_ACPI_BLACKLIST_YEAR=1999, 2009, or whatever.

The default is 0, which disables the cutoff date check.
The reason is that for kernel.org we want folks who build
ACPI into the kernel and run it on ACPI-enabled hardware/BIOS
to get exactly what they asked for -- and to file bugs if it fails.

Please re-open this bug if booting with "acpi=off"
fixes the boot failure.

Comment 3 Andrew Morton 2005-09-14 20:12:44 UTC

OK, thanks.

Turns out that the machine was crashing for non-apci
reasons (Zwane broke the MP parsing code) and acpi actually
works OK on this ancient machine.