jonam
Group: Members
Posts: 37
Joined: May 2006 |
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Posted: June 12 2006,08:37 |
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I would like to request that the cardmgr v3.2.5 used in DSL 2.1b be included in future releases of DSL instead of v3.2.2.
The reason is that it appears that v3.2.5 has fixes to support correct routing of PCI interrupts in the yenta_socket module. This is particulary an issue with the Texas Instruments PCI series of Cardbus controllers found in many older laptops including the Compaq 1500, HP Omnibook and IBM Thinkpad series.
I tested DSL 2.4 and 2.1b on two old laptops - a Compaq 1530D and HP 5700CT and both have the TI PCI1131 controller. Neither of the two laptops would work under DSL 2.4 with my DWL-G650 wireless card.
I tried using both ndiswrapper and the Madwifi drivers. With Madwifi, I was able to get to the point where I could bring up the wireless card with an "ifconfig ath0 up" but after this, I could not get any scan results and a "cat /proc/interrupts" showed the interrupts of the Cardbus controllers stuck at zero. All other indications via dmesg, lspci and lsmod were normal.
After a lot of searching for the cause of the problem, I found two useful articles. The first was the following website which described the interrupt problem and the reason behind it:
ELAN PCI-toPCI bridges
The second was a post on this forum concerning ethernet cards not working on an HP5700 running DSL 2.4, but working fine on DSL 2.1b.
As a result, I changed both laptops to DSL 2.1b and got the wireless card working first time using the madwifi driver for DSL 2.0/2.1b found in the DSL repository.
Just to double check that the problem was with the Cardbus controller, I loaded DSL 2.4 onto a newer laptop (Compaq n610c) which uses a the TI PCI 14xx series of controllers. On this machine, there were no problems whatsoever and I was able to connect to an Access Point and get internet access. I also checked 16bit wired ethernet cards in all computers and they worked fine under either release of DSL. Hence the problem appears to be specific to Cardbus (32 bit).
I would think that other old laptops that might be having the same problems under recent releases of DSL could be fixed by updating the cardmgr and associated modules to 3.2.5.
I would appreciate if you could fix this problem in future releases of DSL as I would like to be able to upgrade to the latest DSL. I am otherwise very happy with DSL as it has allowed me to revive two old laptops that were destined for the scrapheap.
Regards,
Jonam
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