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Old 21st February 2009
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Nobber Nobber is offline
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Default Wireless networking xor battery monitor

I recently installed a 4.5-beta snapshot on my trusty HP Omnibook, and found that everything (including Atheros wireless with WPA) worked nicely except for the battery monitor. Then BSDfan666 chimed in with a tip for disabling apm in favour of acpi. I followed his advice and was pleased to note that klaptop (the battery monitor in KDE) began working!

However, that pleasure was short-lived when I later noticed that my wireless network interface, ath0, no longer existed. Wondering whether the lack of ath0 was related to the lack of apm, I rebooted with apm left on. And sure enough, ath0 was back. I then rebooted with apm disabled once more, and sure enough, ath0 had gone AWOL.

This is quite a dilemma. It seems I am forced to choose between wireless networking and a functioning battery monitor. If truth be told, I'm reluctant to do without either feature.

Advice and suggestions welcome!
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Old 21st February 2009
ocicat ocicat is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Nobber View Post
Advice and suggestions welcome!
I would highly suggest filing an official report such that the developers are aware of this scenario especially given the off chance that it might be fixed by the release date. Information on sending a PR can be found at the following:

http://openbsd.org/report.html

Providing too much information is significantly better than not enough.
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Old 21st February 2009
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Having read the "How to report a problem" page you linked to, I think I need to do a little more research before submitting a bug report.

One thing I did notice is that when apm is enabled, the output of dmesg contains the line:

Code:
cbb0 at pci0 dev 10 function 0 "O2 Micro OZ69[17]2 CardBus" rev 0x00: irq 11
But when apm is disabled, that line becomes:

Code:
cbb0 at pci0 dev 10 function 0 "O2 Micro OZ69[17]2 CardBus" rev 0x00: irq 11, Cardbus support disabled
Which would explain the disappearance of ath0, since I'm using a PC Card network adapter. But why would disabling apm also disable support for CardBus?
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Old 21st February 2009
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This is not the first time we have seen this problem. But, since you have elected not to post your two dmesgs, it will be up to you to determine if you're having the same problem.

In the prior case, the cause was hardware bus enumeration when ACPI was used. See post #27 in http://daemonforums.org/showthread.php?t=2846

If this doesn't match your particular problem, post more information.
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Old 26th February 2009
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jggimi View Post
This is not the first time we have seen this problem. But, since you have elected not to post your two dmesgs, it will be up to you to determine if you're having the same problem.

In the prior case, the cause was hardware bus enumeration when ACPI was used. See post #27 in http://daemonforums.org/showthread.php?t=2846
How do I tell whether my problem is caused by hardware bus enumeration? I couldn't tell (from the posts in the thread you linked to) how you came to the conclusion that hardware bus enumeration (specifically) was causing a problem in that case. I get the "CardBus support disabled" message during boot, just like JohnHicks was, so if sys/dev/pci/pccbb.c is the only place in the kernel that that message appears, I guess my problem is the same as his.

What could cause bus enumeration to fail, anyway? Is the BIOS in charge of that, or the OS kernel? I have run many other OSes on this laptop without running into ACPI/CardBus conflicts, so I suspect a bug in the OpenBSD kernel rather than the BIOS.

Next time I'm in front of the laptop, I'll post the dmesgs.
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Old 27th February 2009
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I'm not sure who to blame. Here's my interpretation:
ACPI is a standard. My understanding, is that either the BIOS makers (and, I suppose, underlying hardware manufacturers) either treat the standard as a "suggestion", or the standard is so loosely defined as to defy any functional interoperability based upon it.

In general, if Microsoft's operating systems function with a particular ACPI implementation, that's often considered "good enough" to ship to customers.
For OpenBSD's kernel, users may disable individual ACPI related kernel components, or, disable ACPI entirely. There are, in addition, diagnostic tools, such as acpidump(8), the output which can be used as part of a problem report one sends to misc@ or in an official bug report.
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