Oct 4 2008
Foxconn motherboard ACPI breakage still not fixed :(
Further to the situation documented here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=869249, it appears that Foxconn are still shipping motherboards with BIOS which are either intentionally or inadvertently broken under any non-Windows OS.
In fact, the situation is worse – the ACPI DSDT tables of the Foxconn A79A-S 790FX/SB750 contain, according to the Intel ‘iasl‘ ACPI compiler, 177 Errors, 8 Warnings, and 3 possible optimisations.
I can only strongly advise anyone who has any interest in open systems or running any OS other than, or in addition to Windows to look elsewhere. The Asus M3A79-T Deluxe is over £70 cheaper for a better specified board, if you’re happy to lose two PCI-E 16x slots in return for two more PCI slots.
4th October 2008 @ 2:24 pm
For further reading, the dmesg and lspci output is attached.
Finally, the output from ‘iasl -tc dsdt.dsl‘ is here.
6th October 2008 @ 11:21 am
My bad – the Asus does also have 4 PCI-E slots… and they’re close enough together that a standard Crossfire bridge-board can be used (unlike the Foxconn, which requires a non-standard, non-supplied longer model. Goodness only knows where you’re supposed to get one of these from if you need one…)