Bug#594952: linux-image doesn't work properly with Pentium M CPU

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

retitle 594952 [AMILO L7300] no frequency scaling support (BIOS has broken voltage tables and speedstep-centrino doesn't support Dothan)
# guessing
found 594952 linux-2.6/2.6.32-21
tags 594952 + upstream
quit

Hi Alexey,

Alexey wrote:

> Computer: Fujitsu-Siemens AMILO L7300
[...]
> FATAL: Error inserting acpi_cpufreq: No such device
[...]
> model name : Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.73GHz (Dothan)
> stepping : 8
[...]
> On Ubuntu Karmic/Jaunty all works fine. It uses speedstep_centrino driver,
> which is deprecated, but works with BIOS which have broken voltage tables..

See http://bugs.debian.org/638913 for some discussion.

Basically, as you've said, this is a bug in your BIOS.  That does not mean
the problem is hopeless --- it is possible for the kernel to work
around well understood BIOS bugs in the worst cases.

So, to move forward on this:

 - Please attach output from "dmesg" and from "acpidump" from immediately
   after booting.

 - The next step would be to contact linux-acpi@vger.kernel.org and your
   BIOS vendor, to get the bug well documented.  If there is information
   about the bug already online somewhere, that could be helpful.

 - Work with the linux-acpi@ people to come up with corrected ACPI tables.
   Make them available.

 - Finally, if the BIOS vendor is uncooperative, come up with a patch to
   add a "quirk" to use an appropriate hard-coded table to match the
   detected (through DMI, I guess) system.  Or add a kernel command line
   argument to switch between tables, and a tool to detect the right
   table at run time.

Hope that helps,
Jonathan