From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0) APM Daemon hangs when system is booted. Unable to determine exact cause. Short term fix boot to single user mode init 1 on the lilo command line and disable apm. System will then boot fine. The system is a compaq Presario 1670 AMD 350Mhz 64 Megs of Ram. Latest bios from compaq is installed Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.boot up system 2. 3. Actual Results: System hangs Expected Results: System should boot normally to logon prompt No error messages given by apm
This is almost certainly a problem with your BIOS ("current" and "working" can be two quite different things), since it works everywhere else. It's definitely not an apmd problem, all apmd does is taking care of executing scripts when the apm status changes (e.g. when you pull the plug or put the machine into suspend). Reassigning to kernel, because that's (1) where the problem might be if it isn't a BIOS bug after all, and (2) it's where workarounds for the problem could go (Mike: what do you think about disabling apm on some blacklist BIOSes?)
Bios-specific APM blacklist is planned and currently under development by the linux APM maintainer
as an extra workaround: rpm -e apmd :)
Well, it worked fine under redhat 6.2. So I dont see how this can be a bios issue. It could be something that was interduced in the 2.4 kernel apm routines. Since it did work on redhat 6.2, I dont how this could be a blacklisted bios. I will try to dig into it more this weekend. And see if I can get some more info as to what is locking up when apmd loads.
Is there a resolution to this yet ?
you could try booting with "apm=off" on the commandline. The difference between older kernels (eg 2.2 kernels as in 6.2 and 7.0) is that the kernel currently trusts the APM bios to comply to the standard a bit more to get extra information and powersaving (eg when the system is idle).
It doesnt do this on debian or Mandrake with newer kernels however redhat 7.2 beta is a litle better, at least it boots, it will lock anytime the apm command is used. It onoly appears to be specific to redhat. My question is it going to be fixed ?
We don't have ANY patches against the APM code. So the only question is which config options are different. I'll check the latest Mandrake kernel; the only thing I can think of is that they have the ALLOW_IRQ option different; that can be overriden at boottime by adding a apm=allowints (7.1) apm=allow_ints (7.2) to the kernel commandline.
Using apm=allow_ints on redhat 7.2 doesn't help issuing apm at the shell prompt causes the system to lock up. apm should return back the battery status or at least thats what it used to return.
Well, I have found the fix sorta. After hacking around with the 2.4.7 source all weekend I downloaded 2.4.9 kernel. I only applied the ext3 patches. And built the kernel using the same options that are used to build the i386 verion except I used the k6 arch instead and omitted the options that are added by the patches. All is good now. So eaither there is a bug in the 2.4.7 kernel or you are creating a bug with patches you apply to the kernel. Also on another note the kernel pcmcia based drivers choke on my laptop when a cardbus card is inserted, works fine with 16 bit cards. So I recompiled with out pcmcia and installed the latest pcmcia-cs drivers from David Hines and all works good. I think I am working at 100%. I am still testing things.