Re: PCIe Hotplug: NFG unless I boot with card already inserted.

Kristen Carlson Accardi
2007-10-16T20:14:05Z

On Tue, 16 Oct 2007 15:31:29 -0400
Mark Lord <lkml@rtr.ca> wrote:

> Mark Lord wrote:
> > Mark Lord wrote:
> >> Kristen Carlson Accardi wrote:
> >>> On Tue, 16 Oct 2007 14:39:33 -0400
> >>> Mark Lord <lkml@rtr.ca> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> I also checked my modprobe.d/ options, and I am using pciehp_force=1.
> >>>> Without that flag, none of this ever works.
> >>>
> >>> OK - I suspected something like this. Most Dell computers don't support
> >>> ExpressCard hotplug using Native PCIe -- in fact, I've not seen a single
> >>> one, they explicitly disable it because they have not validated it or
> >>> they have and something didn't work right. I'll take a look at what
> >>> you've
> >>> got, but be aware that you are forcing pciehp to load and operate on
> >>> a system
> >>> where they've certainly either not tested it, or tested it and something
> >>> bad happened.
> >>
> >> Perhaps. But this one works perfectly, except for two driver bugs:
> >>
> >> 1. Driver does not notice already-inserted cards after modprobe.
> >> 2. Driver fails to function after suspend/resume until reloaded.
> >>
> >> Both of those are fixable in the kernel.
> >
> > Ahh.. point 2 in particular suffers from "suspend/resume" not implemented.
> > Or rather, implemented as a pair of "do nothing" functions.
>

I tried to reproduce this on a Lenovo T61, which does have proper firmware
support for _OSC, and also has been validated, and the driver which is
in 2.6.23-git8 seems to work fine, even across suspend resume. I suspect
that your system just doesn't support pcie hotplug properly.

You might try getting a BIOS update from Dell.