xircom cbem56g-100 support

xircom cbem56g-100 support

[beldridg]

hi,

i'm very confused. today i decided to test the in-kernel pcmcia support.

after a few hours of fiddling, i got my wavelan card to work, no problem
there.

then i tried to get my xircom cbem56g-100 to work.

the pcmcia-cs documentation says:

  "Xircom CardBus cards are supported by a separate driver ('Xircom
   Tulip-like CardBus', xircom_tulip_cb, CONFIG_PCMCIA_XIRTULIP).  Hot
   plug PCI drivers are not managed by cardmgr; they are managed by the
   "hotplug" subsystem."

and i've even seen david hinds post that "cardmgr recognized that this is
a hot plug PCI driver, so it is the responsibility of the Linux hotplug
subsystem to load the driver."

so, i download and install the latest hotplug stuff. and, here is what i
find in the /etc/hotplug/blacklist:

   # tulip ... de4x5, xircom_tulip_cb, dmfe (...) handle same devices
   de4x5
   xircom_tulip_cb
   dmfe

so, can somebody please help me before i just give up (again) and go back
to the pcmcia-cs stuff?

one last question: how do the two interoperate? because now i have some
cardbus cards and some not.


- brett


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Re: xircom cbem56g-100 support

[David Hinds]

On Fri, Aug 17, 2001 at 01:30:53PM -0700, beldridg@best.com wrote:
> 
> so, i download and install the latest hotplug stuff. and, here is what i
> find in the /etc/hotplug/blacklist:
> 
>    # tulip ... de4x5, xircom_tulip_cb, dmfe (...) handle same devices
>    de4x5
>    xircom_tulip_cb
>    dmfe
> 
> so, can somebody please help me before i just give up (again) and go back
> to the pcmcia-cs stuff?

I am not really familiar with things under hotplug, but I think that
this has got to be a bug.

> one last question: how do the two interoperate? because now i have some
> cardbus cards and some not.

The answer is "basically, they don't".  Cards are either hotplug or
not; hotplug cards use the hotplug subsystem, and non-hotplug ones use
the PCMCIA configuration system.

-- Dave

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Re: xircom cbem56g-100 support

[David Brownell]

> > so, i download and install the latest hotplug stuff. and, here is what i
> > find in the /etc/hotplug/blacklist:
> > 
> >    # tulip ... de4x5, xircom_tulip_cb, dmfe (...) handle same devices
> >    de4x5
> >    xircom_tulip_cb
> >    dmfe
> > 
> > so, can somebody please help me before i just give up (again) and go back
> > to the pcmcia-cs stuff?
> 
> I am not really familiar with things under hotplug, but I think that
> this has got to be a bug.

Seems like the xircom_tulip_cb driver got updated sometime after it
got added to the blacklist ... I see a big "#if 0...#endif" in the device
table to get rid of the overlap with other drivers.

Workaround:  comment it out of that blacklist.  Anyone know how
long that "#if 0" has been there?  I'll putback a fix to the blacklist,
but that's the sort of fix that can benefit from a kernel version number.


> > one last question: how do the two interoperate? because now i have some
> > cardbus cards and some not.
> 
> The answer is "basically, they don't".  Cards are either hotplug or
> not; hotplug cards use the hotplug subsystem, and non-hotplug ones use
> the PCMCIA configuration system.
> 
> -- Dave
> 



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Re: xircom cbem56g-100 support

[beldridg]

On Sat, 18 Aug 2001, David Brownell wrote:

> Workaround:  comment it out of that blacklist.  Anyone know how long
> that "#if 0" has been there?  I'll putback a fix to the blacklist, but
> that's the sort of fix that can benefit from a kernel version number.

interesting, that was actually the first thing i tried and it didn't help
and i thought i did a stop/start of hotplug, but apparently not.

it now works.

another quick question:

this is a multifuntion card and hotplug loads the network driver, but is
hotplug or cardmgr responsible for loading the serial driver (esp. since
i'm testing the in-kernel pcmcia drivers and that means just loading the
regular serial.o module)?


if it is cardmgr, how would it be configured? something like:

  device "kernel_serial"
    class "serial" module "kernel/drivers/char/serial.o"

  card "Xircom CBEM56G-100 CardBus 10/100 Ethernet + 56K Modem"
    version "Xircom", "*", "CBEM56G", "*"
    # bind "tulip_cb" to 0, "serial_cb" to 1
    bind "kernel_serial" to 1


(also i guess remove the network binding now that hotplug does it)?


and finally, there seems to be a disadvantage of hotplug at this point:

with pcmcia-cs, if you tried to do a cardctl eject when the interface was
still UP it would return a "ioctl(): Device or resource busy." with
hotplug, since cardmgr doesn't do the configuration, you can eject a card
that still has a live interface. i know people should know better. does
hotplug have functionality similar to "unconfigure and remove?"

-
brett



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Re: xircom cbem56g-100 support

[David Brownell]

> > Workaround:  comment it out of that blacklist.  
> 
> it now works.

As should be ... :)

> another quick question:
> 
> this is a multifuntion card and hotplug loads the network driver, but is
> hotplug or cardmgr responsible for loading the serial driver (esp. since
> i'm testing the in-kernel pcmcia drivers and that means just loading the
> regular serial.o module)?

If this is done with multiple PCI functions, then I'd expect normal
PCI hotplugging to trigger loading the right module.

If the serial function isn't exposed using a PCI function (that is, if
"lspci" doesn't show it) then hotplugging could load "serial.o" by
adding a /etc/modules/pci.handmap functionality ... assuming that
cardmgr is really trying to be ignorant of this card.  That's quite
possibly a gap in the current cardbus hotplug support.  (Want to
implement such support?)


> and finally, there seems to be a disadvantage of hotplug at this point:
> 
> with pcmcia-cs, if you tried to do a cardctl eject when the interface was
> still UP it would return a "ioctl(): Device or resource busy." with
> hotplug, since cardmgr doesn't do the configuration, you can eject a card
> that still has a live interface. i know people should know better. does
> hotplug have functionality similar to "unconfigure and remove?"

I don't know of a good solution for such problems.  As I recall,
"cardmgr" and "cardctl" interact through some sort of state that
records driver/hardware bindings.  Using just "modutils", that sort
of functionality doesn't exist.  The lack shows up in other places;
it's why hotplugging doesn't have an automated way to "rmmod".

What's needed is IMO a generic mechanism that can work for USB,
PCI/Cardbus, and other kinds of hotpluggable drivers.  It should
happen automatically when the hardware is removed.  Presumably
there should be a software-driven version like "cardctl eject", to
support cleaner device shutdown protocols.

And when power management suspends the host, the clean shutdown
should kick in (devices get removed then).  I know that USB needs
some new kernel driver hooks to handle that, we know roughly what
they need to be, but I suspect those new APIs won't get added till
the 2.5 work starts. (Backport should be easy, but every HC driver
needs updating.)

- Dave




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Re: xircom cbem56g-100 support

[David Hinds]

On Sat, Aug 18, 2001 at 08:36:03AM -0700, beldridg@best.com wrote:
> 
> this is a multifuntion card and hotplug loads the network driver, but is
> hotplug or cardmgr responsible for loading the serial driver (esp. since
> i'm testing the in-kernel pcmcia drivers and that means just loading the
> regular serial.o module)?

hotplug should do this, and I thought I had seen reports from people
saying they had gotten it to work.  cardmgr should not do anything at
all with a card once it is identified as hotplug.

-- Dave

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