lenovo R60 SMP/APIC_IO woes

[Matthew Dillon]

:Hmm. I though APIC_IO was needed for SMP to work... I've
:never been 100% sure about how the two
:are coupled though.

    Most SMP systems ought to work without APIC_IO.  Basically there are
    two types of APICs.  Each cpu has a LAPIC, and the motherboard chipset
    has one or more IOAPICs.  SMP requires the per-cpu LAPIC to be present
    but doesn't require the IOAPICs.

    When you compile a SMP kernel without APIC_IO it will compile in LAPIC
    support but not IOAPIC support, and depends on the legacy 8259 (called
    the 'PIC') to route interrupts, which is sometimes more compatible
    with the BIOS.

    There are lots of potential gotchas but usually a SMP box will work
    in one or the other modes (IOAPIC or legacy PIC).  If all else fails
    you can turn on emergency interrupt polling in /boot/loader.conf or
    with a sysctl.  With emergency interrupt polling turned on only the
    timer and IDE disk IRQs need to be properly routed, and they
    usually are.

    kern.emergency_intr_enable	(default 0 = off)
    kern.emergency_intr_freq	(default 10 = 10hz)

					-Matt