Lockups with Orinoco and 2.4.19

[Jim Carter]

On 14 Aug 2002, Thomas Bueschgens wrote:
> Funny thing: Large downloads do not seem to matter... I downloaded
> about 20MBs the first time, about 25MB the second time, just to put
> some stress on the Orinoco.

Good move.  Finger of blame may point elsewhere than Orinoco driver.

> The system worked flawlessly... but while fiddling around with ntpdate
> (you know, those VIA-chipsets really have a Clock-problem with Linux)
> the system froze up again.

I'm grasping at straws here...  IRQ conflict?  I tried a campaign of
fiddling with IRQs.  It was a lot of work, did not improve anything, and I
was advised that the Linux kernel *should* handle shared IRQs flawlessly.
However, NICs (specifically Orinoco) cause a lot of interrupts.  We know
that the Orinoco driver's interrupt handler is called when the shared
device interrupts, and thus has to correctly interpret the situation that
the wireless card has no reason to have interrupted it.  If some other
device's driver is not too bright about this, Bad Things could happen.

> 1. I still have a an old WaveLan / Lucent PC-Card. I bought it about
>    two years ago it it run flawlessly under 2.2.X since then.
>
> 2. I still have a Cisco Aironet which I save for some special
>    purpose... wanted to use it with airsnort on my laptop to get a
>    feeling for it... Would it be of any help to squeeze that bug (if
>    it is one?) trying this card?
>
> Would this help in hunting down the bugs?

Definitely.  Also, do you have some other PCMCIA card that puts a heavy
load on the system, like a Firewire (IEEE 1394) card?  Then you might be
able to conclude that any network card/driver, or any PCMCIA activity, is
poisonous.

I had a symptom related to yours with the Cisco VPN 5000 Virtual Private
Network client.  It was ported from Windoze and the driver does wierd and
wonderful things to substitute itself for your default route, you get the
idea.  "cat /proc/modules" showed that the module's use count was -1,
indicating that it had botched something when registering itself, and I'm
not going to debug it for them; and if you tried to remove the module the
system would freeze instantly. Ignoring minor details, you use the VPN, and
Linux would crash after about an hour of operation.  I wonder if you have
an "unusual" device driver that has a bad interaction with the Orinoco
driver set.


James F. Carter          Voice 310 825 2897    FAX 310 206 6673
UCLA-Mathnet;  6115 MSA; 405 Hilgard Ave.; Los Angeles, CA, USA  90095-1555
Email: jimc at math.ucla.edu    http://www.math.ucla.edu/~jimc (q.v. for PGP key)