10.1 installer won't boot past ACPI

[ojrac]

I'm trying to install FreeBSD on an old machine and having trouble. I'm using FreeBSD-10.1-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img. I've done a little troubleshooting, but hit a wall; with verbose mode on, the install USB drive gets this far before freezing (i.e. numlock light doesn't even toggle):

acpi0: <GBT NVDAACPI> on motherboard
ACPI: All ACPI Tables successfully acquired
PCIe: Memory Mapped configuration base @ 0xe0000000

I tried adding hw.pci.mcfg=0 to /boot/loader.conf on the USB drive (I forget where I got that suggestion), which made it stop one line earlier ("All ACPI Tables successfully acquired").

The machine is pretty empty, and I'm pretty sure everything was on the supported hardware list. Other than disks (which I tried taking out with no improvement), PSU and RAM, all it has in it are:

Mobo: GA-M68MT-D3 (their site says "NVIDIA GeForce 7025 / nForce 630a chipset") running the latest non-beta BIOS (F2)
Processor: AMD Phenom II X6 1055T AM3

Any suggestions for what to try next?

 

[Terry_Kennedy]

Any suggestions for what to try next?

Normally the first suggestion is "update the BIOS", but in your case the vendor seems to have abandoned the motherboard in record time - the first bios was dated 2010/05/26, the one you updated to 2010/06/14, and the final (beta) on 2010/07/15. That's less than 2 months from introduction to abandonment. (reference)

In that case, I would suggest booting with ACPI disabled (see the relevant section of the FreeBSD Handbook). If that works, then you can perform additional debugging as shown in the Handbook to override any problematic sections.

There is a third possibility - something has gone wrong earlier in the boot process but was undetected (such as initializing a component which later hangs the system) and it is only at this point in the boot process that the problem appears. These are hard to detect, but disabling everything you can in the BIOS may help pinpoint it.

 

[ojrac]

Thanks for doing that BIOS research; I reached the same conclusions. Since the update notes were talking about audio issues in Win7, I decided to ignore it.

Disabling ACPI dead-ends me much earlier in the boot process -- enough that it all fits on one screen. I've been taking phone pictures of all of these, so let me know if I'm leaving out anything important when I clip to the last few lines:

(11 lines for SMAP)
APIC: Could not find any APICs.
panic: running without device atpic requires a local APIC
cpuid = 0
KDB: stack backtrace:
#0 0xffffffff80963000 at ??+0
#1 0xffffffff80928125 at ??+0
#2 0xffffffff80e3b241 at ??+0
#3 0xffffffff808d7258 at ??+0
#4 0xffffffff802db5ec at ??+0
Uptime: 1s

I also tried adding hint.apic.0.disabled="1" to /boot/loader.conf; it dead-ends at the same point, with a little extra ACPI logging.

I couldn't find anything obviously ACPI-related that was disabled in the BIOS to turn on, so I went after your third scenario, and disabled everything I could find besides USB (which is how I'm attaching the installer and keyboard). It didn't change the output.

Thanks for including links to docs -- everyone's been great about pointing me in the right direction to learn more.

It sounds entirely likely that the BIOS is to blame since not a lot of updating seems to have happened, and the latest BIOS version didn't even merit enough QA dollars to promote from beta. Is it possible to continue troubleshooting, or should I give up and look around for cheap motherboards that play nice with BSD?

 

[Terry_Kennedy]

I also tried adding hint.apic.0.disabled="1" to /boot/loader.cong; it dead-ends at the same point, with a little extra ACPI logging.

Note that APIC is something completely different from ACPI - just one of the confusing sets of acronyms in the computer industry. You also have a typo (cong instead of conf) but I'll assume that was in the post, not on the computer.

It sounds entirely likely that the BIOS is to blame since not a lot of updating seems to have happened, and the latest BIOS version didn't even merit enough QA dollars to promote from beta. Is it possible to continue troubleshooting, or should I give up and look around for cheap motherboards that play nice with BSD?

I'd wait a day or two to see if someone else has had any experience with that particular motherboard. If you can get it working, you should probably stay with it because anything that old will likely need a set of motherboard + CPU + memory to replace.

Another thing to try would be to download older FreeBSD install discs and see if something older works with your motherboard. This may have been a regression in a (relatively) recent FreeBSD release.

 

[ojrac]

I fixed my typo (edit: nope, the friendly admins beat me to it) -- tab-completion had me covered for the actual conf filename. Thanks.

Thanks for the ideas for troubleshooting while I decide whether I want to try and deal with a replacement board; I had a chance to try booting an 8.4 installer, and it gave me the same issues. It's still ~3 years after this motherboard was "current," so I may try digging back to even older versions tonight.