PCMCIA Freeze with orinoco wireless card
 

Ok, I posted in the wireless forum and have been working with 2Gnu (who has been very informative) but unfortunately we have not solved my problem.

I have a compaq presario 2140 laptop and I downloaded and installed Fedora 5. Everything seems to work fine except my wireless pcmcia card and my touchpad is pretty quirky. The touchpad aside, I REALLY need to figure out my wireless card. 2Gnu has established that I have an original Orinoco Gold Classic card with the hermes/Orinoco_cs chipset/driver:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...02#post2474902. This card/chipset is supposedly nearly plug and play with Linux?

The problem: I think I have the right drivers/modules loaded but the system locks and/or refuses to work with this wireless card. If I plug the card in at boot-time the OS hangs right after the second line after it says “push I for interactive startup” and udev starts loading. If I plug the card in after the OS is loaded and then I type pccardctl insert the computer will again freeze. The only way to fix at that point is to eject the card are do a hard reboot.

2Gnu told me it could be a conflict with the bios/acpi settings. I am not real familiar with acpi or apm settings and even less so in Linux. After being told that, and doing some research on the subject, this sounds like a real possibility. Unfortunately I need step by step advice and how to deal with it.

I’ve included various, hopefully informative output of a few pertinent commands:

here is what my lsmod output reads:

Module Size Used by
autofs4 21573 1
hidp 16193 2
rfcomm 37849 0
l2cap 23873 10 hidp,rfcomm
bluetooth 50085 5 hidp,rfcomm,l2cap
sunrpc 153725 1
orinoco_cs 8013 0
orinoco 40405 1 orinoco_cs
hermes 7745 2
ip_conntrack_netbios_ns 3393 0
ipt_REJECT 5697 1
xt_state 2625 2
ip_conntrack 52085 2 ip_conntrack_netbios_ns,xt_state
nfnetlink 7513 1 ip_conntrack
xt_tcpudp 3521 4
iptable_filter 3392 1
ip_tables 12937 1 iptable_filter
x_tables 14405 4 ipt_REJECT,xt_state,xt_tcpudp,ip_tables
video 17221 0
sbs 16257 0
ibm_acpi 27969 0
i2c_ec 5569 1 sbs
container 4801 0
button 7249 0
battery 10565 0
asus_acpi 16857 0
ac 5701 0
radeon 105569 1
drm 68437 2 radeon
ipv6 246113 12
lp 13065 0
parport_pc 27493 1
parport 37001 2 lp,parport_pc
floppy 57317 0
ohci_hcd 21341 0
joydev 9857 0
snd_ali5451 23501 1
snd_ac97_codec 91360 1 snd_ali5451
snd_ac97_bus 2753 1 snd_ac97_codec
snd_seq_dummy 4293 0
snd_seq_oss 32705 0
snd_seq_midi_event 8001 1 snd_seq_oss
snd_seq 51633 5 snd_seq_dummy,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq_midi_event
snd_seq_device 8781 3 snd_seq_dummy,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq
snd_pcm_oss 42849 0
snd_mixer_oss 16833 1 snd_pcm_oss
i2c_ali1535 7237 0
i2c_ali15x3 8005 0
snd_pcm 76485 3 snd_ali5451,snd_ac97_codec,snd_pcm_oss
ide_cd 38625 2
i2c_core 21697 3 i2c_ec,i2c_ali1535,i2c_ali15x3
snd_timer 23237 2 snd_seq,snd_pcm
serio_raw 7493 0
natsemi 28193 0
snd 52933 11 snd_ali5451,snd_ac97_codec,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq,snd_seq_device,snd_pcm_oss,snd_mixer_oss,snd_pcm,snd_ timer
cdrom 34913 1 ide_cd
soundcore 10145 1 snd
snd_page_alloc 10569 1 snd_pcm
pcspkr 3521 0
dm_snapshot 17389 0
dm_zero 2369 0
dm_mirror 28817 0
dm_mod 56921 12 dm_snapshot,dm_zero,dm_mirror
ext3 129737 2
jbd 58473 1 ext3

Here is my /etc/modprobe.conf file:

alias wlan0 orinoco_cs
alias eth0 natsemi
alias snd-card-0 snd-ali5451
options snd-card-0 index=0
options snd-ali5451 index=0
remove snd-ali5451 { /usr/sbin/alsactl store 0 >/dev/null 2>&1 || : ; }; /sbin/mmodprobe -r --ignore-remove snd-ali5451

Here is the output for iwconfig

[root@localhost ~]# iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

sit0 no wireless extensions.

Output of lspci

00:00.0 Host bridge: ATI Technologies Inc AGP Bridge [IGP 320M] (rev 13)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc PCI Bridge [IGP 320M] (rev 01)
00:02.0 USB Controller: ALi Corporation USB 1.1 Controller (rev 03)
00:06.0 Multimedia audio controller: ALi Corporation M5451 PCI AC-Link Controller Audio Device (rev 02)
00:07.0 ISA bridge: ALi Corporation M1533/M1535 PCI to ISA Bridge [Aladdin IV/V/V+]
00:08.0 Modem: ALi Corporation M5457 AC'97 Modem Controller
00:0a.0 CardBus bridge: O2 Micro, Inc. OZ601/6912/711E0 CardBus/SmartCardBus Controller
00:10.0 IDE interface: ALi Corporation M5229 IDE (rev c4)
00:11.0 Bridge: ALi Corporation M7101 Power Management Controller [PMU]
00:12.0 Ethernet controller: National Semiconductor Corporation DP83815 (MacPhyter) Ethernet Controller
01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility U1

If I launch net configurator - neat, listed are eth0, and wlan0. eth0 is active, of course, and wlan0 is not. If I try to activate wlan0 I get: orinoco_cs device wlan0 does not seem to be present, delaying initialization.

[root@localhost ~]# iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

sit0 no wireless extensions.

[root@localhost ~]# ndiswrapper -l
installed drivers:
ntpr11ag invalid driver!

ifconfig only lists stats for eth0 and loopback

[root@localhost ~]# ifconfig wlan0 up
wlan0: unknown interface: No such device

[root@localhost pcmciautils-014]# pccardctl ident
Socket 0:
no product info available

I don't think I changed the boot file properly; I wasn't sure exactly where to insert the pc=noacpi option. My line looks different then the insertion 2Gnu showed in his example: kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.10-5-386 root=/dev/hda6 ro pci=noacpi. I was trying to disable ACPI services (I think) to see if that affected the lockup situation. Here is a snippet of the /boot/grub/menu.lst file that he told me to modify.

# NOTICE: You have a /boot partition. This means that
# all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
# root (hd0,1)
# kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
# initrd /initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/hda
default=0
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd0,1)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title Fedora Core (2.6.18-1.2200.fc5)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-1.2200.fc5 ro pci=noacpi root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.18-1.2200.fc5.img
title Fedora Core (2.6.15-1.2054_FC5)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb
quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5.img
title Windows XP Pro
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
(END)

I would like to thank 2Gnu for all the help. I am hoping someone else might see this, have had a similar problem, and know exactly what is going on.

Hmm..........

I see no pcmcia_core and/or yenta_socket loaded from your lsmod output

What does cat /proc/interrupts show??

[root@localhost ~]# cat /proc/interrupts
CPU0
0: 91548 XT-PIC timer
1: 322 XT-PIC i8042
2: 0 XT-PIC cascade
5: 89 XT-PIC ALI 5451
6: 3 XT-PIC floppy
7: 2 XT-PIC parport0
8: 1 XT-PIC rtc
9: 5401 XT-PIC acpi, ohci_hcd:usb1
10: 17996 XT-PIC yenta, radeon@pci:0000:01:05.0
11: 15031 XT-PIC eth0
12: 57039 XT-PIC i8042
14: 10194 XT-PIC ide0
15: 2763 XT-PIC ide1
NMI: 0
LOC: 0
ERR: 0
MIS: 0

This does not look good, both your pcmcia interface and video card are sharing the same IRQ; 10: 17996 XT-PIC yenta, radeon@pci:0000:01:05.0

Does the earlier kernel (2.6.15-1.2054_FC5) work with the wireless/pcmcia devices, can you use the wireless pcmcia card in other words with this kernel or do you have the same IRQ issue??

I also noticed no IRQ's above 15 are listed, perhaps you might want to change that and enable/use acpi??


Many years ago now I learned how to build my own kernels because of issues with the exact same pcmica controller and wireless card as you with the kernels as supplied by Red Hat back then (RHL-6.2 and higher). Maybe it is time you learned how to build your own kernel; http://www.digitalhermit.com/linux/K...ild-HOWTO.html

Building a new kernel for Red Hat / Fedora differs a little bit from the guide, the steps in order are;

make mrproper (or make clean after the first time)
make menuconfig
make
make modules_install
make install

The 'make menuconfig' step is the most important one and two things to note. First if your building a new kernel from the kernel.org source then the configuration file from Red Hat / Fedora will not work because the changes they make to their supplied kernel sources. And take the time to make sure you configure the kernel for not only your hardware but also some needed things like netfilters section. It may take a number of attempts to build your first working kernel but it is worth the effort.

First, so your saying I did successfully kill acpi at bootup with that noacpi line I added in the bootup script? I didn't think it was in the right spot.

Second, the "yenta" is specific to my pcmcia controller on the motherboard and since both it and the graphics interface are sharing the same IRQ, this is most definitely the issue with the computer freezing when the card is inserted?

Third, the reason IRQ's above 15 are not listed is because of the "noacpi" line I added to bootup? I need to remove this to make above 15 available again?

In conclusion, to fix my problem I need to resolve the conflict and the only way to do this is by recompiling the kernel (which for me, is going to be a great challenge)?

Just as a note: I did try to boot to ubuntu desktop with a live cd, and it froze in the same manner with the card insert. It too, wouldn't boot with the card inserted at bootup. I believe ubuntu is based on the Debian distro but I have no idea how this relates or not to the latest kernel.