Re: Broadcom 4401 problem

[Pekka Pietikainen <pp@ee.oulu.fi>]

On Sun, Aug 22, 2004 at 02:53:46PM -0600, Bruce Guenter wrote:
> Greetings.
> 
> I have a Dell Inspiron 1150 laptop which has a built-in Broadcom 4401
> NIC.  I am using Gentoo's 2.6.8.1 kernel and the built-in b44 driver.
> It compiles, loads, and I can get basic network traffic through it just
> fine.  However, it (the NIC) locks up randomly when I try to do bulk
> data transfers (with rsync for example).  I can get it to reset itself
> 
> Is this likely a hardware problem, or a problem in the driver?
Hiya

Could you try the driver from http://www.ee.oulu.fi/~pp/b44-095-2.tgz ,
which has some fixes that have been submitted but not yet merged. If that
doesn't help, the broadcom driver 
( http://www.broadcom.com/drivers/downloaddrivers.php ) might be
worth a try.

Also if you have more than 1Gb of memory, booting with mem=1024m 
might help (although with standard kernels with a 3:1
memory layout this hardware bug shouldn't get triggered and the typical
symptom is a complete hang). But it's worth a try in any case.
The updated driver mentioned above contains a workaround, so this shouldn't 
be needed anymore in any case.

Anyway, please report whether any of this helped. 
-- 
Pekka Pietikainen