if_ndis with custom CPUTYPE

Adam McMaster adam at moosoft.net
Thu Jan 13 16:22:06 PST 2005


Hey,
I've recently had a confusing problem using the NDIS modules and 
thought it might be of interest to someone.  On Sunday I decided to 
update to the latest RELENG_5_3, since there have been some patches 
since the initial release.  Everything seemed to work perfectly after 
everything was rebuilt and installed, until the next morning when I 
discovered that the PC was no longer able to connect to my wireless 
network.  I'm still not sure exactly what the problem was, all I can 
say is that I never got an "ndis0: link up" message.

After some thinking, I realised that I had customised the CPUTYPE and 
CFLAGS variables in make.conf since last time I built FreeBSD, and 
after some experimenting I managed to get it to work by rebuilding the 
ndis and if_ndis modules without the CPUTYPE variable set.  So my 
assumption is that something GCC did with the CPUTYPE variable broke 
the ndis modules (or at least one of them).

Interestingly, the card continued to work after a reboot.  It was only 
after the PC was actually powered off (i.e. when I went to bed that 
night) and powered back on that the problem occurred.

If it helps, the card is a Belkin F5D6020 ver 3, and I'm using the 
rtl8180 driver (available from the RealTek web site).  In make.conf I 
had CPUTYPE=athlon, and here is the output of uname -a:

FreeBSD phoenix 5.3-RELEASE-p4 FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE-p4 #0: Sun Jan  9 
17:10:20 GMT 2005     root at phoenix:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  i386


That's all I've got to say; hopefully this can be helpful to someone in 
the future.

--
- Adam McMaster <adam at moosoft.net>



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