Can anyone explain this?

[Galen Sampson]

Adam K Kirchhoff wrote:
On Sun, 16 Nov 2003, Matthew Dillon wrote:


:I have a dual P3 VIA motherboard (from Gigabyte) that I'm currently
:running multiple operating systems from: Slackware 9.1, NetBSD -CURRENT,
:DragonFlyBSD, BeOS, Windows XP, and Syllable.
:
:Of those six, any time I reboot from DragonFlyBSD, I get the following
:message from the computer when it POSTs.
:
:"CMOS/GPNV Checksum Bad"
:
:When I first noticed this pattern, I chalked it up to coincidence, and
:just reset the CMOS to it's default values with F2 and kept going.
:However, I'm beginning to doubt this is a coicidence any more.  I have
:spent all weekend rebooting between operating systems, with different
:hardware configuration nearly every time, and this *only* happens when I
:reboot from DragonFly.
:
:Does this make any sense?  Could the OS be screwing up my CMOS?
:
:Adam
   Yes, it is screwing up the CMOS.


Woohoo, I'm not crazy! :-)


   Several people have reported this,
   but so far nobody has been able to track it down.  I don't have a
   system that does this so I haven't been able to track it down either.
   Would you like to try to track it down?  It involves throwing an endless
   loop into the low level boot code to lock the machine up and then hitting
   reset, then moving the loop to zero in on which part of our codebase is
   corrupting the CMOS.


My programming skills (especially when it comes to operating systems) if
fairly limited.  If I get a chance this week, though, I might take a look
and see if there's anything I can do.
Adam


While I have no evidence to back up the statement I'm about to make, I 
feel that it is probably the acpi code.  I have a ~5 year old gateway 
machine that has a bios supporting acpi.  When using freebsd 4.8 (no 
acpi support) the machine would boot fine every time.  Now that 4.9 came 
out I compiled acpi support into the kernel.  The power button on the 
front functions perfectly with acpi, and I don't have to worry about 
apmd, etc.  Now that I am using acpi every time I turn the machine on I 
get an error "Drive A: floppy device incorrect.  Press ESC to continue 
booting".  Of course I could be totally wrong.

Regards,
Galen