[ACPI-sppt] Mitac 8170 RH9

I have a Mitac 8170 laptop. It's a very nice machine, but the one thing
that has never worked is suspend/resume. I would very much like to get
this to work, so here I am.

Now that the 2.4.21 kernel is finally out, and reportedly contains some
ACPI fixes, I thought I would try again. So I downloaded a fresh copy of
the source, configure and compile it, and boot it with apm=off specified
(configured with ACPI support, of course). I used a config file that I
had previously from the Red Hat 2.4.20-9 kernel, and did "make
oldconfig", answering a few questions about new parameters. Build and
install.

At this point, "cat /proc/acpi/sleep" shows "S0 S3 S4 S5". "echo 4 >
/proc/acpi/sleep" and "echo 5 > /proc/acpi/sleep" both cause an
immediate poweroff. "echo 3 > /proc/acpi/sleep" actually does put the
machine to sleep! First time I had ever seen it in that state. Looks
like good progress. Except, there is no way to wake the machine back up!
The only key that does anything at all is the power button, and hitting
that causes the machine to sort of wake up, but it's in a hung state.
All I get is a gray screen with a blinking underbar cursor in the upper
left, and no response from keyboard or mouse. I have to hold the power
button down to power off in order to recover.

I know that ACPI support is properly enabled, because I can program
acpid so that pressing the power switch does a clean shutdown, and
pressing Fn-F12 (the sleep key) will put the machine into that
unrecoverable sleep mentioned above.

OK, so I know there is a patch you're supposed to apply, so that's next.
Download the acpi-2.4.21-patch file, and run it through patch. Another
"make oldconfig", followed by compile and install and reboot. At this
point, ACPI doesn't work at all. There are no messages about it at boot
time.

If I now look at the kernel config file, only CONFIG_ACPI is available.
All the other ACPI parameters are grayed out. So I take a look at the
patch file, and I notice there are some other apparently unrelated
parameters that come into play, with names ending in "*APIC" (not a
typo). If I select some of those, suddenly the other ACPI parameters are
available! So I enable them, another make oldconfig, compile, install,
reboot. ACPI messages do appear at boot time, and acpid dutifully logs
events. However, the machine will not go to sleep at all. "echo 3 >
/proc/acpi/sleep" has no effect. "echo 5 > /proc/acpi/sleep" does cause
a sudden power off, and the power button still does a clean shutdown,
but no joy for suspend/resume.

So, the questions: has anyone gotten ACPI to work on a Mitac 8170? What
are these other kernel config parameters and how do they relate to ACPI?
They are not even in the same submenu. Are there other kernel parameters
that I might need to select or deslect to make this work? Are there BIOS
settings I should look at?

Thanks for any help in advance.

-- 
Greg Woods <[email protected]>
NCAR/SCD



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