I have a Netgear WG511 (original version, not a SoftMAC) which I'm using with a Toshiba Satellite 2545XCDT under Slackware 10.0. Under kernel 2.6.7 and prism54 driver 1.1, the card works fine. Under kernel 2.6.8 or later, the card fails. (Kernel 2.6.8 ships with version 1.2 of the prism54 driver, so I compiled version 1.1 separately in an attempt to determine whether my problem lay with the driver version or the kernel version.)
The errors I get vary somewhat depending on the driver version. Early versions complain that:
eth1: device soft reset timed out
eth1: timeout waiting for mgmt response 1000, triggering device
while the most recent versions say:
Apr 27 16:43:44 wretched kernel: eth0: no 'reset complete' IRQ seen - retrying
Apr 27 16:43:45 wretched kernel: eth0: no 'reset complete' IRQ seen - retrying
Apr 27 16:43:45 wretched kernel: eth0: interface reset failure
Apr 27 16:43:45 wretched kernel: prism54: Your card/socket may be faulty, or IRQ line too busy
I know that a lot of APCI changes went into 2.6.8, so my guess is that my system doesn't work well with the new ACPI/IRQ code. I've tried the pci=routeirq parameter suggested in KERN_INFO, but it doesn't help me. Since the card works fine under 2.6.7, my hope is that this can be solved by adjusting ACPI configuration. Unfortunately, I am completely in the dark about what changes to make. I don't really understand how IRQs work on a modern system, and am so clueless that I'm not even sure what questions to ask.
Any recommendations?
