FC6 on a HP DC7700

[Thomas Swan]

Gianluca Sforna wrote:
> Hi all,
> I just put my hands on a shiny HP DC7700, a Core 2 Duo based PC, but I
> can't boot the installer because it hangs right after detecting
> keyboard and mouse (PS/2)
>
> Does anyone experienced similar issues?
>
> googling around I already find some (scary...) info, and tried w/o
> luck booting with acpi=off (boot, but it seems like hanging on every
> screen, then eventually go on with the next after some minutes!),
> noapic and nolapic.
>

Yes, we have ordered several of these, and Fedora is painfully slow (it
runs so much better on a 5 year old laptop).   Originally, we thought it
might be broken ACPI BIOS implementation and Linux just interacts poorly
with it, but we aren't sure.   With the v1.06 BIOS update the system
will install without disabling ACPI, but it runs about 1/300th the speed
it should.   One would think with HP's commitment to Linux they wouldn't
drop a  %#@$!@ like this out on the market.   According to a few people
in HP's forums, they do not want to hear anything about Linux not
running on the DC7700.

On FC6 2.16.18-2869:
# time ( let X=0; while [ $X -lt 1000 ] ; do let X=$X+1 ; done )
real 0m8.631s
user 0m8.385s
sys 0m0.203s

On FreeBSD 6.2RC2:
# time ( let X=0; while [ $X -lt 1000 ] ; do let X=$X+1 ; done )
real 0m0.025s
user 0m0.025s
sys 0m0.000s


I have tried almost every combination of clock= acpi=
acpi_os_name="Spoo!" noapictimer nolapic noapic acpi=irq ... that you
could imagine with no success in improving the performance.    An
experimental 2.6.20 (rt) kernel seemed to run about 10 times faster, but
it was still to slow to be used.  (Screen repaints on login are about 5
seconds)

Once, during a reinstall the rescue shell (using x86_64) on the
installation CD ran at the same speed as BSD.   I have not been able to
see reproduce it, ever.   I have installed both i386 and x86_64 versions
with no real discernible difference in performance.   I will assist in
anyway I can, if someone wants to help track this down.