Sony Ericsson GC85 GPRS/EDGE pcmcia card

[Espen Tagestad]

M. Warner Losh wrote:
> That's because you have a slow machine :-(.  Its interrupt latency is
> too large.  You're best bet is to hack sio.c to have a lower interrupt
> threshold.

I don't think my machine is too slow, it is a 1,8Ghz Pentium 4 Mobile. 
I'll have a look in sio.c on how to lower the interrupt threshold.

> : I've read a lot of documentation on the net about this issue, and I 
> : think I've tried most of the tips and tricks suggested. I tried to 
> : change the irq assigned for the card without luck, I have set the 
> : cp4ticks to 4096 in sio.c (that removed the interrupt-level buffer 
> : overflows in the log, but then network still don't work as it should), I 
> : changed the list of available irqs in pccard.conf, and I really don't 
> : know what to do next.
> 
> What does it mean 'network doesn't work'.

I get connected, but when transfering special amounts of data (may be 
binary) the network does not respond. Another example is that ssh don't 
work unless I use ssh version 1. http works, but https does not. And 
when the network doesn't work (but I am still connected via ppp) I get 
this sio overflows in the log.

> : The irq seems to be hardcoded to 3, but in Windows it shows up with irq 
> : 7, which in the FreeBSD log I get a message like this: stray irq 7. The 
> : card works well in Windows, so I don't think is a hardware problem.
> 
> Yes.  We use pci interrupts when we can with oldcard.  One can use
> other kinds of interrupts, but I doubt that will help too much...

Hmm, ok.

> : Does anyone have any tips or suggestions on how to get this card to work 
> : properly with FreeBSD? Has anyone managed to get this card, or some of 
> : the other Sony-Ericsson GC-cards, to work at all with FreeBSD?
> 
> Hacking sio.c is your best bet.  If you can service the interrupts
> fast enough, and get the data into ppp, it should work.  If you are
> getting the data and the network isn't working, then you'll need to
> diagnose why.

I'm very sure that there's a problem with the interrupts, since I'm 
getting these sio overflows in my log. They often appear when the 
network do not respond. Do you have any tips on what to look for in 
sio.c? :) On FreeBSD 4 I increased cp4ticks to 4096, after someone (I 
don't remember where) said that this value could be too small for 
115200. I've also set the speed in ppp.conf to 9200, but still the same 
result.

> : PS. The reason why I don't run FreeBSD 5 is that it just don't work on 
> : thia laptop at all.
> 
> bummer.

Well, I got FreeBSD 5 working yesterday, as I wrote in one of my 
previous posts. The symptoms is the same, but it takes much longer time 
until I get the sio interrupt-overflows in the system log. Often I get 
only one log entry, but the network is still not responding as it should.

Espen