pcmcia card freezes on suspend, and will not resume
 

I have a laptop that i have been running Debian on for a couple years, and just recently decided that i should actually use it as a laptop. So, I bought a wireless card, an Ambicom wl1100-pc, PCMCIA/cardbus card, which works wonderfully. Next I decided that it might be important to see what battery life I have left while roaming the house/office, so I turned on APM, which up until now I hadn't bothered with. That also works wonderfully. The only problem is when I shut the lid of my laptop it goes into power-save standby. The problem here is that my wireless card gets the suspend command, and suspends, but wont come back up. Every command just gives me a "Device busy or invalid" error. I've tried the following commands:

cardctl resume
ioctl(): Device or resource busy.

cardctl eject
ioctl(): Device or resource busy.

cardctl reset
doesnt do anything

/etc/init.d/pcmcia stop
Stopping PCMCIA: ioctl(): Device or resource busy.

/sbin/ifdown wlan0
Not configured.

Pull the card out, put it back in. Nothing

When this happens I have to reboot my computer. I wouldnt mind just disabling suspend to the card all together, this computer is usually plugged in anyway. Its just very frustrating, any help or suggestions would be much appreciated.


Jon

That seems more like a pcmcia bug then having to do with the card... although since the device name for the ambicom is wlan0 that means 3rd party driver, which means non-kernel standard which means possibly beta and buggy. Do you get the same behavior out of another pcmcia card? Anything to test it really? Also, I don't know Debian's default APM config, but if it was conservative... which makes sense for debian, they might have left out some specific laptop options as well as some apm options that make for better suspend/resume. You mentioned also having this laptop for a couple years... what're the odds it has acpi support in the BIOS? '99 and the first few P3's were the first to have that, so its a longshot I guess, but it typically handles power events better then base apm.

Sorry that was a lot of mostly voodoo suggestions, but it might help :)

Cheers,

Finegan

thanks for the reply.

no apci.

my only other PCMCIA card is a linksys pcm200 ethernet card. when I insert this card, close the lid, open it back up everything comes up fine and dandy.

i will look into the APM configs, and see if there is anything in there that allows me to change things around.

Nah, if the pcm200... what's that, pcnet_cs? tulip_cb? its an old, stable and well coded driver so its 99% probably just the wireless card driver isn't built well and can't handle power events. Which evil bugger is it btw? realtek8180? linux-wlan.net?

Cheers,

Finegan

the pcm200 is tulip_cb

the wireless is linux-wlan

i have followed your original idea and checked into the APM. I found in the kernel options for APM that "Ignore user suspend" was set at N, so I turned that bugger on, recompiled, rebooted, and now I can close the lid without the card dying, but I no longer have any power savings, oh well. This is kind of a crappy fix, but it works good enough for me.

Thanks for the help finegan.