Sager NP9860 laptop + ACPI, Hyperthreading, etc.

g32 · n00b Joined: 06 Aug 2003 Posts: 11

I have recently installed gentoo on my new Sager 9860 laptop. To give some background, the laptop's pertiant hardware consists primarly of:
Intel 915p chipset -- PCI-Express
NVidia Go6800 PCI-Express video card
ICH6 southbridge
Promise SATA378 (Tx2Plus) SATA controller for the hard drives.
3.4Ghz P4 Processor (same as a desktop processor)

I have made my way though the installation process and had sucess with just about everything. Everything except ACPI + Hyperthreading. I have looked for some solutions on this forum as well as others and found nothing that has worked yet. I have SMP and ACPI both enabled in the kernel, however if I boot with anything except ACPI=ht, the kernel chokes after finding the hard drive on the SATA controller. I figured that would still provide enough ACPI support to get Hyperthreading to work (hence the 'ht') but alas, only one CPU shows up and dmesg reports a warning saying there is another sibiling present but unaccounted for. If anyone has any suggestions or info I would appriciate the help. If need be, I will post my dmesg and/or .config info. Thank you for reading.

-- Jon

Note: I am currently using kernel-2.6.9-r13 but I will try the newest gentoo-dev-sources. I don't see any reason why it would fix the issue but...why not try?

oeri · n00b Joined: 07 Jan 2005 Posts: 15

How the heck did you get the LiveCD to detect the hard drives? I have been pulling my hair out for the last two weeks! I have the exact same laptop as you, except the 3.6 GHz model

g32 · n00b Joined: 06 Aug 2003 Posts: 11

What kind of hard drive did you get? Where does the LiveCD lock up at specifically? As I understand it, the PATA hard drives do not yet work properly under libata and RAID support is broken. I however seemed to have lucked out with my single SATA hard drive. I think libata will be fixed soon. If you do have PATA: what does the controller register as on boot up? Is it still acting under the Promise Tx2Plus role?

On a tangential note: I have gotten ACPI to work splendidly under 2.6.10-r3, so there is much to look forward to. Other than the camera and TV tuner (if you opted for one), everything else should work just fine. With luck, libata will pull though or Promise will get their act together.

Best of luck and I hope I can be of some service to help you setup Gentoo on this kick ass machine. :wink:

oeri · n00b Joined: 07 Jan 2005 Posts: 15

I am running 2 x 60 GB drives under SATA. The promise_sata driver seems to mention something about scsi0 and scsi1, but it tells me no devices are found.

g32 · n00b Joined: 06 Aug 2003 Posts: 11

What is your setup in BIOS? RAID or ATA mode?

-- Jon

oeri · n00b Joined: 07 Jan 2005 Posts: 15

oeri · n00b Joined: 07 Jan 2005 Posts: 15

It would be great if I could get _anything_ to access the hard drive so I could just compile a 2.6 kernel with the Promise drivers built right in!

g32 · n00b Joined: 06 Aug 2003 Posts: 11

I used the Gentoo 2004.2 Universal CD to boot with no options and the default gentoo kernel setting. I didn't have any other booting issues and it worked wonderfully to install Gentoo. I can't think of any reason why having two SATA drives should adversely affect the LiveCD boot. Which LiveCD are you using?

-- Jon

oeri · n00b Joined: 07 Jan 2005 Posts: 15

2004.3 universal, I will try 2004.2....although 2004.3 should have worked..

oeri · n00b Joined: 07 Jan 2005 Posts: 15

no such luck...still looking for a solution

DarkTempes · Posted: Wed Feb 09, 2005 7:06 pm Post subject:

i know some people got this working...
but for me with 2.6.10 (the x86-installcd-minimal-2005.0-rc5.iso) it finds PATA hard drives but gets errors under load

for example, i can partition them fine, then i get this:

snekiepete · Guru Joined: 07 May 2003 Posts: 306 Location: WISCONSIN

I need some help here(sager 9860), I am dual booting and have installed Gentoo on what I thought was "/dev/sdb3". However I am getting a kernel panic at boot that states:

VFS: Cannot open root device

I have compiled the scsi/sata drivers for promise, but am I missing something here? Installation went fine, I can mount the drive from livecd, but no boot. Any help would be appreciated.

I have the bios set to ATA.

echo6 · Guru Joined: 04 Jan 2003 Posts: 587

snowski · n00b Joined: 12 Apr 2005 Posts: 5

sanityspeech · n00b Joined: 17 Apr 2005 Posts: 1

Successfully installed Gentoo 2005.0 on the NP9860, and is set to dual-boot with windows. My favorite apps include X, octave, lbreakout2, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Gkrellm2 and Mozilla Firefox. They all seem to work just fine. Although ALSA is installed, sound does not work. It appears that gentoo-sources is required for the system to work; attempts to use mainline kernels with the same configuration fails.

Update (05/05/2005): To use ALSA, I compiled the snd-azx module from the source, alsa-1.0.8. There was a complaint about 'include/linux/version.h' missing in the genkernel-compiled kernel. To address this problem, I typed 'make prepare-all' in the root directory of the kernel. Next, I did the following in the root directory of the ALSA v1.0.8 source:
#./configure --with-cards=azx
# make
# make install
Unmuted the cards, and adjusted the volume with alsamixer.

Update (05/25/2005): Using alsa-1.0.9, replace '--with-cards=azx' by '--with-cards=hda-intel'.