ABIT IC7-G Power Off Issue

[Justin Piszcz]

# shutdown -i 0 -g 0 -y

On the first revision of the bios (3/27, 1.0) it would power off with no problems.

On the newest revision of the bios (8/28, 1.7) it gets to Power Down and then hangs (does not fully power off).

I've asked on newsgroups and forums, people who run windows have no problems shutting down, it seems to be a linux-specific problem.

I've used 2.4.21, 2.4.21 with this motherboard.

I do not want to use the old BIOS because I get occasional kernel panics, why, I have no idea, although I would venture to guess it has something to do with the i8xxx random number generator driver, hw support.

I have e-mailed abit and lkml in the past but received no response.

With the new BIOS, I never experience any lockups or kernel panics, but I cannot power off the machine except by pressing the button.

After executing: shutdown -i 0 -g 0 -y
Gets to:
Flushing hda hdb hdc, etc, then
Power Down.

But then it stays here, everything stays on, the video, the box, etc.

The most important to kernel developers(?) is probably the bios changelog:

http://www.abit-usa.com/downloads/bios/bios_revision.php?categories=1&model=4

Something, I do not know what changed so shutting down is just not possible anymore, I would like to get to the root of the problem.

The motherboard is based on the Intel 875P chipset, further specifications are availible from their site:
http://www.abit-usa.com/products/mb/products.php?categories=1&model=4

The manual is here:
http://salebios.tiger2.net/vendor/ABIT/manual/english/ic7-g.pdf

I do believe this is a kernel related issue somewhat, due to reviewing the abit forums and not finding anyone with this problem, although most users are windows users. As well as asking on the abit newsgroup and not getting any helpful response either.

I'd run the old bios but I cannot deal with random kernel panics when I am trying to get work done.

Does anyone have any suggestions how to debug or fix this problem?

 

[Andrew Schulman]

After executing: shutdown -i 0 -g 0 -y
Gets to:
Flushing hda hdb hdc, etc, then
Power Down.

But then it stays here, everything stays on, the video, the box, etc.

I used to have this exact problem. I solved it by forcing the ospm_system module to load at boot time, by mentioning it in /etc/modules. ospm_system is part of ACPI; on your system it might be a different module, e.g. if you use APM.

What seems to happen is that at power down, the last thing the kernel wants to do is to call ospm_system to turn the power off. But the kernel module loader has already been shut down, so if the module hasn't already been loaded, it can't load and the kernel hangs.

I had this problem with the 2.4 kernels, but I believe it's been solved in
2.6. I'm running 2.6.0-test4, and now that I look back I find that I don't even have an ospm_system module any more. But the system still powers down correctly. The last message I see on the screen now is "calling acpi_power_off". This isn't a module; it seems to be a function that's built into the kernel when ACPI support is enabled.

Good luck,
Andrew.

 

[Justin Piszcz]

Thanks for the info!

On Thu, 09 Oct 2003 19:59:16 -0400, Andrew Schulman wrote:

After executing: shutdown -i 0 -g 0 -y
Gets to:
Flushing hda hdb hdc, etc, then
Power Down.

But then it stays here, everything stays on, the video, the box, etc.

I used to have this exact problem. I solved it by forcing the ospm_system module to load at boot time, by mentioning it in /etc/modules. ospm_system is part of ACPI; on your system it might be a different module, e.g. if you use APM.

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