PCMCIA networking failure going 5.4R-->6.1R

[Vicknesan AYADURAI]

Hi all,

Am posting this 'solution' as a follow-up to my original question, 
which is now 'fixed'. After more Net-trawling, I found a similar 
problem described on the freebsd-acpi list, with a workaround:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-acpi/2006-June/002833.html

Seems like there's some magic involved with IBM ThinkPads and PCI IRQ 
assignments. Anyway, having the following lines:

>    hw.cbb.start_memory=0xd8000
>    hw.pci.link.LNKA.irq=11
>    hw.pci.link.LNKB.irq=11
>    hw.pci.link.LNKC.irq=11
>    hw.pci.link.LNKD.irq=11

in my 6.1R /boot/loader.conf enabled both my PCMCIA cards to get 
assigned IRQ 11, and work without any hitches.

Just a general FYI,
vick

On Wed, 30 Aug 2006, Vicknesan AYADURAI wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Have been wrestling a bizarre problem unsuccessfully for a week now and am 
> hoping someone on this list might be able to help.
>
> My home router is an old IBM Thinkpad 600 notebook, with two 3Com Megahertz 
> 589E PCMCIA ethernet cards - 1 linking to the Internet, and 1 to an in-home 
> 192.168.0/24 LAN. I believe this to be reliable, battle-tested hardware, and 
> everything, i.e., routing, NAT, DHCP, IPFW, etc., had been running smoothly 
> for months on FreeBSD-5.4R
>
> A week ago I did a fresh install of FreeBSD-6.1R and the problem with the 
> network cards appeared. Both PCMCIA cards are detected as ep0 and ep1 upon 
> bootup, and can be assigned their static IP addresses. However, the 
> networking on one of them is _extremely_ slow.
>
> Pinging a host at the 'other-end' of the ethernet link results in a cycle of 
> 10 packet coming in simultaneously in a burst, a pause for 10 seconds, 
> followed by the next 10 packets simultaneously, a further pause of 10 
> seconds, etc., etc.
>
> I've determined that the problem is slot-dependent, as either card in this 
> slot exhibits this bursty/pause problem.
>
> However, and this is the 'bizarre' bit, booting up with a FreeSBIE CD 
> (running FreeBSD-5.3R) on the same hardware results in no problems with the 
> networking - on _both_ PCMCIA slots.
>
> Hence, the problem seems to be that a PCMCIA network card works with 5.XR but 
> not 6.1R.
>
> One difference I have noticed between the two RELEASEs is the card on the 
> 'dodgy' slot is detected as (from dmesg):
>
> ep1: <3Com Megahertz 589E> at port 0x110-0x11f irq 9 function 0 config 1 on 
> pccard1
>
> when booted up with 6.1R, but 'irq 10' (instead of 9) when booted up with 
> 5.3R.
>
> I'm now suspecting that perhaps the hardware for the good and bad scenarios 
> may not be 100% identical as different IRQs are assigned with the different 
> releases to the network card on the 'dodgy' slot. 'vmstat -i' doesn't show 
> any IRQ collisions, but I'm suspecting that perhaps there's some problem with 
> the PC's IRQ 9 (?).
>
> What I've been trying to do in the last 24-hrs is to get a different IRQ 
> (i.e., not 9) assigned to the card in the 'dodgy' slot to test this 
> hypothesis out, but haven't been able to figure out how PCMCIA 
> IRQ-assignments are done in 6.1R. In the good old (pre-6.1R) days, IRQ 
> assignments could be assigned at the start of /etc/pccard.conf, but 
> pccard.conf doesn't seem to do much with 6.1R.
>
> Has anyone observed this behaviour before? Does the diagnosis sound remotely 
> plausible? If so, does anyone know how I can get a different IRQ assigned to 
> a PCMCIA card in a specific slot?
>
> Alternatively, any other ideas/tips/suggestions/words of comfort would be 
> also greatly appreciated :-)
>
> Regards,
> vick
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