Broadcom 4401 problem

Broadcom 4401 problem

[Bruce Guenter]

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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
by either taking the interface down and up, or by running "ethtool -A
eth0 rx off tx off".  Both actions appear to cause the NIC to disconnect
and renegotiate with the switch.

What is unusual, to me, is that while the NIC is malfunctioning, it
still can transmit packets.  I have run tcpdump on both the laptop and
the destnation system, and the laptop still transmits the trailing TCP
ACKs and ARPs, however it does not receive any responses.

I have tried to reproduce this with Windows (which is also installed)
but have been unable as of yet to do so.  I am not, however, ruling out
a hardware problem, as the "activity" light on the NIC flickers
constantly even when there is no traffic.

Is this likely a hardware problem, or a problem in the driver?
-- 
Bruce Guenter <bruceg@em.ca> http://em.ca/~bruceg/ http://untroubled.org/
OpenPGP key: 699980E8 / D0B7 C8DD 365D A395 29DA  2E2A E96F B2DC 6999 80E8

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Re: Broadcom 4401 problem

[Pekka Pietikainen]

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

Re: Broadcom 4401 problem

[Bruce Guenter]

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On Mon, Aug 23, 2004 at 01:17:34AM +0300, Pekka Pietikainen wrote:
> 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.

Thanks.  This source has some problems.  When compiling, I get multiple
errors regarding PCI_DEVICE_ID_BCM4713 being undefined:
/root/b44/b44.c:94: error: `PCI_DEVICE_ID_BCM4713' undeclared here (not in a function)
etc  Is this missing a header file or some other update?

In order to try to get it to compile, I removed the PCI table entry for
the BCM4713 and made every conditional that depends on it false (by
removing the appropriate code).  However, when trying to ifconfig the
interface I get:
	SIOCSIFFLAGS: Cannot allocate memory
	SIOCSIFFLAGS: Cannot allocate memory

> If that
> doesn't help, the broadcom driver 
> ( http://www.broadcom.com/drivers/downloaddrivers.php ) might be
> worth a try.

The Broadcom Linux driver version 3.0.7 also locks up on me, but it
doesn't support "ethtool -A", so I have to stop and start the interface
completely to get it working again.

> Also if you have more than 1Gb of memory, booting with mem=1024m 
> might help

Nope.  512MB RAM.
-- 
Bruce Guenter <bruceg@em.ca> http://em.ca/~bruceg/ http://untroubled.org/
OpenPGP key: 699980E8 / D0B7 C8DD 365D A395 29DA  2E2A E96F B2DC 6999 80E8

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Re: Broadcom 4401 problem

[Pekka Pietikainen]

On Mon, Aug 23, 2004 at 09:57:12AM -0600, Bruce Guenter wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 23, 2004 at 01:17:34AM +0300, Pekka Pietikainen wrote:
> > 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.
> In order to try to get it to compile, I removed the PCI table entry for
> the BCM4713 and made every conditional that depends on it false (by
> removing the appropriate code).  However, when trying to ifconfig the
> interface I get:
> 	SIOCSIFFLAGS: Cannot allocate memory
> 	SIOCSIFFLAGS: Cannot allocate memory
Oh right... Yea, the code assumes that someone added the 4713 id (0x4713 ;)
) to pci_ids.h. Interesting that it runs out of memory though. The new
version does use quite a bit of GFP_DMA (== memory under 16MB since there's
no way of allocating memory under 1GB, which would do.). Apart from some
legacy ISA stuff I don't think anything else should be sucking it up, so
there should be enough, at least after a fresh boot.
> > If that
> > doesn't help, the broadcom driver 
> > ( http://www.broadcom.com/drivers/downloaddrivers.php ) might be
> > worth a try.
> The Broadcom Linux driver version 3.0.7 also locks up on me, but it
> doesn't support "ethtool -A", so I have to stop and start the interface
> completely to get it working again.
Whew, maybe it's not a driver issue. Only thing I can think of is trying a
few different kernels (say 2.6.7, 2.4.x if that fails), acpi=off, pci=noacpi
on the command line etc.

-- 
Pekka Pietikainen