[Beowulf] S2466 permanent poweroff, round 2

[David Mathog]

>    We have seen this on lots of Tyan boards in general. 

This probably doesn't help, on the problem machine:

% cd /tmp
% cp /proc/acpi/dsdt .
% iasl -d dsdt
% iasl -tc dsdt.dsl

Intel ACPI Component Architecture
ASL Optimizing Compiler version 20060707 [Sep  8 2006]
Copyright (C) 2000 - 2006 Intel Corporation
Supports ACPI Specification Revision 3.0a

dsdt.dsl   234:             Store (Local0, Local0)
Error    4049 -                         ^ Method local variable is not
initialized (Local0)

dsdt.dsl   239:             Store (Local0, Local0)
Error    4049 -                         ^ Method local variable is not
initialized (Local0)

dsdt.dsl   244:             Store (Local0, Local0)
Error    4049 -                         ^ Method local variable is not
initialized (Local0)

dsdt.dsl   295:     Method (\_WAK, 1, NotSerialized)
Warning  1079 -                 ^ Reserved method must return a value (_WAK)

dsdt.dsl   309:             Store (Local0, Local0)
Error    4049 -                         ^ Method local variable is not
initialized (Local0)

dsdt.dsl   314:             Store (Local0, Local0)
Error    4049 -                         ^ Method local variable is not
initialized (Local0)

ASL Input:  dsdt.dsl - 2550 lines, 85340 bytes, 671 keywords
Compilation complete. 5 Errors, 1 Warnings, 0 Remarks, 346 Optimizations

The _WAK warning is suspicious but I see that on other
machines where the powerbutton does work, so that alone
is not sufficient to cause the permanent poweroff.  There's a note
somewhere that at least older versions of linux ACPI did not check
the return value in any case.  However the 5
instances where uninitialized variables are used would go a long
way towards explaining the flakiness of this Tyan board.

That said, to date I've *never* seen a BIOS whose DSDT could
be dumped and then recompiled cleanly.  The best so far was
a SuperMicro motherboard with only 1 error and 7 warnings.

This is what comes, I believe, of 500 page specs like that for ACPI.

Regards,

David Mathog
mathog at caltech.edu
Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech