Lockups with PCMCIA WLAN-card

peksi · n00b Joined: 22 Mar 2003 Posts: 6

I recently got myself an SMC 2632W PCMCIA WLAN-card. It is based on the very common Prism2 chip. After some hassling I found out that the card has issues with the current 2.4.20-kernel, so I downgraded to 2.4.19 and actually got it working. But that was not the happy ending... ever since I've been having odd lockups from time to time. It seems like the card goes offline, but doesn't inform the kernel about it or something... leaving it waiting... I have noticed that the lockups don't affect the rest of the system, which keeps running fine, but the network connection obviously drops and the system refuses to accept no input. I found that a workaround for this is to simply remove the card from the PCMCIA-slot and then put it back. After that, everything's back to normal... This is still very annoying though. I haven't played networked games recently, but I can imagine this might ruin quite a lot of good sessions. Something that I noted just a few moments ago about the problem is that after the card goes offline, I can still move the mouse around, start programs, etc... but if I touch the keyboard, the mouse too jams...
Anyone having the same sort of problems as I am? I am suspecting it is a bug with some PCMCIA power management my system might have, but I haven't looked at the BIOS for options regarding anything like that yet...

Here are the specs/version numbers involved:
Computer: IBM Thinkpad 600X
Network card: SMC 2632W, chipset Prism2, driver orinoco_cs
Kernel: gentoo-sources 2.4.19
pcmcia-cs: 3.2.4

mbobak · Posted: Tue Apr 15, 2003 11:42 pm Post subject: Consider linux-wlan-ng.....

Have you considered linux-wlan-ng?

I have had MUCH better luck with this set of drivers than
the native kernel orinoco_cs driver.

I'm running a WPC11 (LinkSys) in my laptop and a WPC11 in
a WDT11 (PCMCIA/PCI adapter) in my desktop. Both are
rock solid with gentoo-sources-2.4.20-r2.

-Mark

BradN · Posted: Wed Apr 16, 2003 12:11 am Post subject:

You might try the following strategy instead of kernel drivers:

Build a new kernel with...
No PCMCIA support
Wireless networking support, but NO actual drivers selected inside.

Reboot with the new kernel (** You may want to do an "emerge --fetchonly pcmcia-cs wireless-tools" first if this means you won't have network when you reboot), then emerge pcmcia-cs and it should build the drivers and the tools. Since you're using a wireless card, you'll also want to emerge wireless-tools.

The PCIC= option in /etc/conf.d/pcmcia is worth looking at - my chipset uses i82365. Test out PCMCIA with "/etc/init.d/pcmcia start" before you rc-update to add it to start up - just in case it's going to lock up your system. Also, I'd suggest doing a "depmod -a" command if you don't reboot first, as the modules might not be found otherwise.

I personally use the HostAP drivers, which I think are a derivative of the wlan-ng drivers. I also had strange card lockup issues like you mentioned with the orinoco drivers and my Sony Vaio / prism2 - I actually ran a script on a terminal to reset the pcmcia card every 30 seconds or so as a workaround.

If you want to try the wlan drivers, I imagine you'd want to emerge linux-wlan-ng probably after pcmcia-cs, but I'm not sure what's necessary to make it use those drivers. You used to be able to choose with a use flag for pcmcia-cs to select which drivers it compiles, but now it looks like wlan is split into a seperate ebuild. I had to hack the device list in /etc/pcmcia/config to make it use the HostAP drivers with my card.

I may have forgot something, so if you run into problems, keep your old kernel around just in case...

peksi · n00b Joined: 22 Mar 2003 Posts: 6

I have actually tried the linux-wlan-ng -drivers and I had the same problems... I might try what you suggested for avoiding the kernel drivers. What are the HostAP-drivers? Something you need if you run your PC as an access point?
EDIT: I wouldn't believe that the problem is in the wlan-drivers, since I had the same problems with both the kernel drivers and the linux-wlan-ng. On the other hand, I guess it could be in the kernel pcmcia-drivers... I will be looking into that...

peksi · n00b Joined: 22 Mar 2003 Posts: 6

No luck so far... I have now tried the kernel drivers, the pcmcia-cs drivers and the linux-wlan-ng drivers, so I''m pretty sure the problem isn't in the drivers. :-P I also checked my BIOS-options, but couldn't find anything relevant... I have also tried disabling APM from my kernel, in case it's shutting the card down or something, but that didn't help... One last thing I've come up with is upgrading the firmware, but as always, I cannot do that from Linux, so I need to borrow somebody's Windows-laptop, or install Windows on this one... which I could actually consider for playing some games... other than that, it would become pretty useless.
EDIT: I have now noticed that there seems to be much more of the mentioned lockups than before... I'm getting them every five minutes at least, while it might had taken an hour before...

SamBuca · n00b Joined: 18 Mar 2003 Posts: 27

My lockups start by the wireless device dropping the network connections. I'd restart network services and it would tell me that eth1 isn't started. Running 'iwconfig' would show half the options missing from the wireless device. Then the entire machine locks.

I think it might have something to do with my Dell i2600 and it's crappy BIOS (A04). If you read the battery status or wireless status (battstat and gwireless Gnome panels) too many times, it does what I described above. Haven't whined to the linux-dell-laptops group yet, though

War driving and leaving the machine on overnight to trap weak packets from fellow downtown WEPpers also causes lockups...especially with Airsnort (Kismet doesn't lock as much).

Could be a /proc thing, could be a PCI thing, could be a kernel thing, could be a driver thing....

jbrown · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 17 Feb 2003 Posts: 81

i found that the gkrellm wireless plugin crashed my card when bandwidth was maxed out. I had to reload the module to fix it. Just in case you are running it and didn't mention...

BradN · Posted: Thu Apr 17, 2003 7:56 pm Post subject:

The HostAP drivers are supposed to let you run an access point, but I was hoping they would let me do bridging (which apparently doesn't work, or at least I can't get it to).

peksi · n00b Joined: 22 Mar 2003 Posts: 6

arand · Apprentice Joined: 22 Apr 2003 Posts: 215

For what it is worth I am haveing similar problems as previously mentioned. I have an IBM 600x except I have an Atmel based wirless NIC. I am not sure what causes the lockups. What I have found works for me to come out of the lockup is to unplug my computer from AC power and put the computer into suspend. Then bring the computer back out of suspend. Everything works after this. If anyone has a solution I would love to hear it.

Thanks