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Altoid

Member

Registered: 2017-05-07

Posts: 1,581  

[SOLVED] fwts in for Devuan Beowulf

Hello:

Now that I have a bit more time on my hands, I have decided to take up (once again) the troubleshooting of my Sun Ultra 24 BIOS and DSDT tables.
The BIOS in my box has a couple of annoying bugs:

1. a shutdown freeze with fans at 100%
2. a system restart after shutdown.

Both are of an absolutely aleatory nature and have never been able to reproduce them.
They just happen.

I strongly suspect that at least a part of the present situation is due to the fact that the board reports itself as being "Portable":

groucho@devuan:~$ sudo inxi -M
Machine:   Type: Portable System: Sun Microsystems product: Ultra 24 v: 0.00.01 serial: 0123456789 
           Mobo: Sun Microsystems model: Ultra 24 v: 50 serial: 3K08QG BIOS: American Megatrends v: 1.56 date: 01/21/2011 
groucho@devuan:~$ 

At ~ 16/19 kg. it quite obviously is not.

It IDs itself as being portable (probably) because the BIOS' ACPI FADT(Fixed ACPI Description Table) has the field PreferredPowerManagementProfile set to a value of "2" (Mobile) instead of any other value such as workstation, server etc. and this setting probably has some effect on what is going on.

But I digress ...

DSDT table modification has always been an area largely dominated by OSx enthusiasts wanting to run Apple's OS on x86 boxes, so Linux based tools are scarce.

But I have come across a Linux based application called ftws for which there are *.deb files (Ubuntu) available for download.
See: https://pkgs.org/download/fwts

I'd appreciate some guidance as to which to choose between the ones available for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

Thanks in advance,

A.

Head_on_a_Stick

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From: London

Registered: 2019-03-24

Posts: 3,125  

Website

Re: [SOLVED] fwts in for Devuan Beowulf

I'd appreciate some guidance as to which to choose between the ones available for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

I think the latest version would be best (fwts_18.03.00-0ubuntu5_amd64.deb).

But you might be able to fix things with acpica-tools instead. See https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/DSDT for an overview of the technique.

If you can fix it then remember to submit a bug report with your findings so that the upstream kernel developers can make things work for everybody else.

---

Brianna Ghey — Rest In Power

Altoid

Member

Registered: 2017-05-07

Posts: 1,581  

Re: [SOLVED] fwts in for Devuan Beowulf

Hello:

I think the latest version would be best (fwts_18.03.00-0ubuntu5_amd64.deb).

Right, thank you.

... fix things with acpica-tools instead.
See https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/DSDT for an overview of the technique.

Thanks, I'll have a look at that.
I know how and have been able to load an alternate DSDT, modified to be able to re-compile with no errors vis-a-vis the 30+ errors the original DSDT has.
It turned out to be rather tricky because different version of the Intel compiler produce different results on errors and warnings.

For this specific BIOS I settled on the one that supports ACPI Specification Revision 6.2A.

The catch is that I have not been able to solve the problems I describe in my previous post and it seems that the fwst application may shed some light on it as it has a number of tests to run and (try) to debug the BIOS/tables.

... submit a bug report with your findings so that the upstream kernel developers can make things work for everybody else.

Of course I will.
But to be honest, I don't expect anything much.

I wrote about this in 2019, a comment on a previous bug report in 2018:
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=201965
No answers or fixes upstream.

A chap found a solution for a similar problem with a relatively new (?) Asus board.
He posted his findings here:
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=210689 
No answers either.

He then saw my post, wrote to me about his findings and got me started on this again, after a couple of years.
I used his DSDT data on mt tables but was not able to solve my problem.

I'm aware that I have the perfect combination: 10 year old + unmaintained hardware + non-existent OEM.
If you add that Sun evidently employed untrained monkeys to write this BIOS ...

rant
ie: how is it possible that a top of the line Sun WS worth US$1800/2300 in 2007 had a BIOS reporting it as "portable"?
A bug that was never fixed in later BIOS versions?
/rant

Thanks for your input.

Best,

A.

Altoid

Member

Registered: 2017-05-07

Posts: 1,581  

Re: [SOLVED] fwts in for Devuan Beowulf

Hello:

... latest version would be best (fwts_18.03.00-0ubuntu5_amd64.deb).

Both this and the previous version (fwts_18.03.00-0ubuntu1_amd64.deb) have some dependency problems.

groucho@devuan:~/Downloads$ sudo apt install /home/groucho/Downloads/fwts_18.03.00-0ubuntu1_amd64.deb
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Note, selecting 'fwts' instead of '/home/groucho/Downloads/fwts_18.03.00-0ubuntu1_amd64.deb'
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.

The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 fwts : Depends: libfwtsiasl1 (= 18.03.00-0ubuntu1) but it is not installable
        Depends: libfwtsacpica1 (= 18.03.00-0ubuntu1) but it is not installable
        Depends: libfwts1 (= 18.03.00-0ubuntu1) but it is not installable
        Depends: fwts-efi-runtime-dkms (= 18.03.00-0ubuntu1) but it is not installable
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
groucho@devuan:~/Downloads$ 

I installed with apt install because it is supposed to solve dependencies but these don't show up with apt list.

Should I enable the Ubuntu repo? (I think not ...)

Thanks in advance,

A.

rolfie

Member

Registered: 2017-11-25

Posts: 1,172  

Re: [SOLVED] fwts in for Devuan Beowulf

Try apt -f install ....

rolfie

Head_on_a_Stick

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From: London

Registered: 2019-03-24

Posts: 3,125  

Website

Re: [SOLVED] fwts in for Devuan Beowulf

Should I enable the Ubuntu repo?

No. You'll have to download the individual .debs from the Ubuntu repositories and install them in order. Use the URL for the package you already have and change the package name (and version if necessary).

Or perhaps follow https://wiki.debian.org/CreatePackageFromPPA to build some local Devuan packages from the Ubuntu source.

---

Brianna Ghey — Rest In Power

Altoid

Member

Registered: 2017-05-07

Posts: 1,581  

Re: [SOLVED] fwts in for Devuan Beowulf

Hello:

Try apt -f install ....

Didn't work.
Those packages do not seem to be in the Devuan Beowulf repositories.

Should I enable the Ubuntu repo?

No. You'll have to download the individual .debs from the Ubuntu repositories ...

I see ...

Seems there is a snap package which I distrust because of snap and a live version I can run from an SD card.
I think that's the best option for now.

Thanks for your input.

Best,

A.