Dell Inspiron 2650 Bios A12/A13 Warning

[Cheesefoam]

After doing a clean install of Gentoo on my laptop, I discovered numerous strange things occurring with xfree, my mouse, and my keyboard which never happened before in any of my other installations. Most notably was the fact that when I tried to do a CTRL-ALT-F1 to get back to a text console from xfree, the screen would die, often with a kernel panic.

I did some digging and finally found the root cause - a BIOS update that I had done a while back to address some other issues. It seems that with the A12 and A13 BIOS updates, there is also a new NVidia BIOS update, and it does not play well at all with linux - most especially with the nvidia drivers for xfree (even the ~x86 masked 53.36 ones).

Furthermore, though I have been unable to replicate it exactly yet, I believe this BIOS is also related to kernel boot hardlocks that occur with kernel versions 2.6.5 and above when a PS/2 mouse is plugged into the mouse port and ther kernel has the 4k stack size patches applied. Since my last experience with this left me with a corrupted root partition after numerous kernel panics, I am hesitant to dig into this in great detail, though I will give it one more crack to see if I can replicate it.

Anyways, I thought I would let all of you who have Inspiron 2650s to stay well clear of the A12 and A13 BIOS revs. A11 and earlier seem to work just fine, though.