Help wanted with IRQ routing.

Help wanted with IRQ routing.

[Nigel Cunningham]

Hi all.

(Get to play the customer for once!)

While visiting the US, I purchased a Netgear 511T card for my laptop.
It's being a pain to set up, and so I'm wanting to ask for some help.
(For the record, I set up a 311 on my desktop machine, so I believe I
know what I'm doing in general).

The problem I see is that when I start wpa_supplicant (ie actually start
to use the card), everything freezes up. If I pop the card out quickly,
I see that a couple of thousand interrupts have occurred in the couple
of seconds. If I'm too slow, I have to restart the machine.

I've spent a fair while Googling with the result that I think my problem
might be solved by getting the card on an interrupt line all by itself
(feel free to tell me I'm wrong!). I'm not sure how to achieve that
though. I've tried using setpci, but I don't have enough knowledge to do
anything useful.

Can someone help? I can provide the output dump_pirq, lspci and whatever
else you want if you tell me what will be helpful.

Nigel
-- 
Nigel Cunningham
Software Engineer, Canberra, Australia
http://www.cyclades.com

Ph: +61 (2) 6292 8028      Mob: +61 (417) 100 574



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Re: Help wanted with IRQ routing.

[Bjorn Helgaas]

On Mon, 2005-02-14 at 19:59 +1100, Nigel Cunningham wrote:
> While visiting the US, I purchased a Netgear 511T card for my laptop.
> ...
> The problem I see is that when I start wpa_supplicant (ie actually start
> to use the card), everything freezes up. If I pop the card out quickly,
> I see that a couple of thousand interrupts have occurred in the couple
> of seconds. If I'm too slow, I have to restart the machine.

Did you try booting with "pci=routeirq" or turning off PNPACPI?
I've seen a few reports of IRQ problems with PCMCIA devices that
seemed to be related to one or both of these.

If one of these makes a difference, I'd like to compare the dmesg
logs of the broken and working configurations.



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Re: Help wanted with IRQ routing.

[Nigel Cunningham]

Hi Bjorn.

Thanks for the reply.

On Tue, 2005-02-15 at 03:24, Bjorn Helgaas wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-02-14 at 19:59 +1100, Nigel Cunningham wrote:
> > While visiting the US, I purchased a Netgear 511T card for my laptop.
> > ...
> > The problem I see is that when I start wpa_supplicant (ie actually start
> > to use the card), everything freezes up. If I pop the card out quickly,
> > I see that a couple of thousand interrupts have occurred in the couple
> > of seconds. If I'm too slow, I have to restart the machine.
> 
> Did you try booting with "pci=routeirq" or turning off PNPACPI?
> I've seen a few reports of IRQ problems with PCMCIA devices that
> seemed to be related to one or both of these.

I tried pci=routeirq and it didn't make a difference. I assume PNPACPI
is the ACPI Hotplug driver? If so, it didn't help either. It if helps at
all, this is an Omnibook XE3-GF (4304 flavour).

> If one of these makes a difference, I'd like to compare the dmesg
> logs of the broken and working configurations.

Regards,

Nigel
-- 
Nigel Cunningham
Software Engineer, Canberra, Australia
http://www.cyclades.com

Ph: +61 (2) 6292 8028      Mob: +61 (417) 100 574



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Re: Help wanted with IRQ routing.

[Bjorn Helgaas]

On Tue, 2005-02-15 at 09:19 +1100, Nigel Cunningham wrote:
> > Did you try booting with "pci=routeirq" or turning off PNPACPI?
> > I've seen a few reports of IRQ problems with PCMCIA devices that
> > seemed to be related to one or both of these.
> 
> I tried pci=routeirq and it didn't make a difference. I assume PNPACPI
> is the ACPI Hotplug driver? If so, it didn't help either. It if helps at
> all, this is an Omnibook XE3-GF (4304 flavour).

Actually, PNPACPI is a build-time config option.  If your kernel
is new enough, you can also turn it off at boot-time with
"pnpacpi=off".



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Re: Help wanted with IRQ routing.

[Nigel Cunningham]

Hi again Bjorn.

On Thu, 2005-02-17 at 03:14, Bjorn Helgaas wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-02-15 at 09:19 +1100, Nigel Cunningham wrote:
> > > Did you try booting with "pci=routeirq" or turning off PNPACPI?
> > > I've seen a few reports of IRQ problems with PCMCIA devices that
> > > seemed to be related to one or both of these.
> > 
> > I tried pci=routeirq and it didn't make a difference. I assume PNPACPI
> > is the ACPI Hotplug driver? If so, it didn't help either. It if helps at
> > all, this is an Omnibook XE3-GF (4304 flavour).
> 
> Actually, PNPACPI is a build-time config option.  If your kernel
> is new enough, you can also turn it off at boot-time with
> "pnpacpi=off".

Okay. I booted 2.6.11-rc4 with the option, but no difference, I'm
afraid. Is there anyway I can force it to use a different IRQ? I'll
happily try ugly setpci commands :>

Regards,

Nigel
-- 
Nigel Cunningham
Software Engineer, Canberra, Australia
http://www.cyclades.com

Ph: +61 (2) 6292 8028      Mob: +61 (417) 100 574



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Discover which products truly live up to the hype. Start reading now.
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Re: Help wanted with IRQ routing.

[Bjorn Helgaas]

On Mon, 2005-02-14 at 19:59 +1100, Nigel Cunningham wrote:
> While visiting the US, I purchased a Netgear 511T card for my laptop.
> It's being a pain to set up, and so I'm wanting to ask for some help.
> (For the record, I set up a 311 on my desktop machine, so I believe I
> know what I'm doing in general).
> 
> The problem I see is that when I start wpa_supplicant (ie actually start
> to use the card), everything freezes up. If I pop the card out quickly,
> I see that a couple of thousand interrupts have occurred in the couple
> of seconds. If I'm too slow, I have to restart the machine.
> 
> I've spent a fair while Googling with the result that I think my problem
> might be solved by getting the card on an interrupt line all by itself ...

Ok, let's back up.  Is there something that points to ACPI here?
What driver does the 511T use?  I'd be more inclined to suspect
a problem there.  For example, maybe the interrupt service routine
returns IRQ_NONE when it should return IRQ_HANDLED.

As far as getting the card on an interrupt by itself, it's probably
hard to do that in a laptop, except by removing the drivers for the
other devices that share the interrupt.  If you can try that, the
results would be interesting.

I'd be interested in seeing the complete dmesg log and /proc/interrupts
contents.  Not that I have any good ideas, but at least it's a concrete
place to start ;-)



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Re: Help wanted with IRQ routing.

[Nigel Cunningham]

Hi Bjorn.

Thanks for your reply. I'm increasingly agreeing with you, thinking it's
a problem with the driver rather than with the interrupt routing. I've
therefore tried posting to the Madwifi list (the driver for my card).
I'll let you know what the outcome is :>

Nigel
-- 
Nigel Cunningham
Software Engineer, Canberra, Australia
http://www.cyclades.com

Ph: +61 (2) 6292 8028      Mob: +61 (417) 100 574



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SF email is sponsored by - The IT Product Guide
Read honest & candid reviews on hundreds of IT Products from real users.
Discover which products truly live up to the hype. Start reading now.
http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=6595&alloc_id=14396&op=click