Dell 5160 / Wireless

[Peter D. Quilty]

I have an Inspiron 9100 with a Dell 1350 card running 5.3-RELEASE-p5.
I've been using the ndis driver for about a month now with only the
occasional minor problem.

ndis0: <Dell TrueMobile 1300 WLAN Mini-PCI Card> mem
0xfaff6000-0xfaff7fff irq 17 at device 3.0 on pci2
ndis0: NDIS API version: 5.1
ndis0: Ethernet address: 00:90:96:a3:80:81
ndis0: 11b rates: 1Mbps 2Mbps 5.5Mbps 11Mbps
ndis0: 11g rates: 6Mbps 9Mbps 12Mbps 18Mbps 36Mbps 48Mbps 54Mbps

ndis0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
        inet 192.168.1.57 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255
        ether 00:90:96:a3:80:81
        media: IEEE 802.11 Wireless Ethernet autoselect (DS/11Mbps)
        status: associated
        ssid MY_SSID_HERE 1:MY_SSID_HERE
        channel 1 authmode OPEN powersavemode OFF powersavesleep 100
        rtsthreshold 2312 protmode OFF
        wepmode MIXED weptxkey 1
        wepkey 1:104-bit

It works great 99% of the time, but occasionally under certain heavy
load conditions I get the following:

kernel: ndis0: watchdog timeout
kernel: ndis0: link down

When I do "ifconfig ndis0 up", I then get:

kernel: NDIS: buggy driver deleting active packet pool!
kernel: NDIS: buggy driver deleting active buffer pool!
kernel: ndis0: link up

And it starts working again.  I haven't been able to figure out why, but
it hardly happens, so I haven't spent any time on it.

PDQ


On Wed, 2005-03-02 at 21:55 -0800, Frank Mayhar wrote:

> Philip M. Golllucci wrote:
> > I've got a dell 5160 notebook with builtin wireless ethernet.
> > The ethernet is none existant.
> 
> Inspiron 5160?  It has an RJ45 for wired ethernet based on a Broadcom
> chip, use the bfe(4) driver.  As for the wireless, you have two options.
> You can use the ndis(4) driver to run the Dell 1350 (really another Broadcom
> chipset), or you can replace that with an Atheros-based minipci card and
> use the ath(4) driver.
> 
> I chose the latter course and am using it right now.  I am running -current,
> however, since the wireless support there is _much_ better than that in
> 5.x.  Running -current is not for the faint of heart.