Starting with kernel 2.6.23-rc1, the i386 APM driver fails
on several of my machines with the message:
apm: BIOS not found
This happens because of a bug in the i386 boot code rewrite
from assembler to C. The original assembly code had the
following code in its APM BIOS presence test (boot/setup.S):
andw $0x02, %cx # Is 32 bit supported?
je done_apm_bios # No 32-bit, no (good) APM BIOS
That is, the code bails out if bit 2 is zero.
In the new C version, this is coded as (boot/apm.c):