dmesg spam: "PnPBIOS: pnp_dock_thread: unexpected status 0x5 flooding"

[devzero]

Hi, 

on an ancient GX1 Geode embedded board (Evo T20/Wyse wt3235le Thin Client, which are cheap (<$10) and low power x86 embeded platform) , dmesg is getting constantly spammed with "PnPBIOS: pnp_dock_thread: unexpected status 0x5" during and after boot. 

Any ideas what this means and how to stop that?

It seems it comes from drivers/pnp/pnpbios/bioscalls.c -> pnpbios_print_status()  

Tried adding pnpbios=off, but with that the system does not boot anymore.

Being curious, why a non-existing docking-station is being "polled at regular intervals" (i.e. every 2 seconds - see drivers/pnp/pnpbios/core.c )

>From http://books.google.de/books?id=ibLa4I5EnC4C&pg=PA231&lpg=PA231&dq=pnp+docking+bios&source=bl&ots=ekCFm34U_B&sig=9Z9L55IAL7_3NtuM10jT3serncM&hl=de&sa=X&ei=mAZcVILnJsviO-r5gNgI&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=pnp%20docking%20bios&f=false   i read:  "Function 05h - Get Docking Status Information at page 251" 

it  seems this is being the result of a "docking event" ? Does this mean, my system is erroneusly generating such docking events, even if there is no docking station at all?

regards
roland

ps:
i`m booting via plopKexec Bootloader ( http://www.plop.at/de/plopkexec.html ) , as i can put kernel+rootfs on external usb and don`t need to reflash the device, which is complicated task.

pps:
some few old pointers from other people reporting it:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-kernel/2005/02/msg00238.html
http://sourceforge.net/p/open-evot20/mailman/message/20065770/
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