Re: Mark IPW2100 as BROKEN: Fatal interrupt. Scheduling firmware restart.

From: Evgeniy Polyakov
Date: Sun Sep 21 2008 - 15:02:51 EST


On Sun, Sep 21, 2008 at 11:35:13AM -0700, Arjan van de Ven (arjan@xxxxxxxxxxxxx) wrote:
> > And how else user can get attention to the problem which is not fixed
> > by the vendor?
>
> ... or the community

Which does not have access to the firmware... Which IMO is failing and
not the driver itself.

> > It stops after several seconds (or packets?). Sometimes (but rarely)
> > it works several minutes, sometimes it fires above dmesg line and
> > continues to work, sometimes it fires it for a while and then stops
> > writing it, although driver does not send or receive anything (at
> > least ifconfig counters do not change).
>
> again.. so how about you detect this condition and do, in the driver
> code, the equivalent of rmmod/insmod to the hardware. I'm sure people
> who have the hardware would appreciate that type of patch a lot more
> than the one you sent out.

Reset task does efectively ipw2100_up(), so the difference is power
cycles over the PCI bus and enable/disable/request commands. Like this
stuff:
/* We disable the RETRY_TIMEOUT register (0x41) to keep
* PCI Tx retries from interfering with C3 CPU state */
pci_read_config_dword(pci_dev, 0x40, &val);
if ((val & 0x0000ff00) != 0)
pci_write_config_dword(pci_dev, 0x40, val & 0xffff00ff);

I do remember I had a tibet monk course of decoding ipw2100 PCI
config address space, just need to find my kimono.

Do you want me to implement ipw2100 driver as a big work structure
which will run ipw2100_init()/wait/ipw2100_exit() in a loop?
And that will be the fix suggested by Intel? That would explain a lot.

P.S. And some people tell that asking for bug bisection is a hard
pressure on user. Vendor has to ask him to fix bug himself instead,
and that will be a solution!

Getting the fact, that rmmod/insmod does not always fix the problem (but
most of the time for a short period of time), I again want to point,
that it looks like a firmware problem related to some inner timings. You
ask me to fix the driver and do not even listen to what I said
previously and do not get that into account and analyze.

--
Evgeniy Polyakov
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/