IBM T40p: em0/ath0 failure and PCMCIA difficulties

[Peter Schuller]

Some (weird?) updates:

> I tried copying the driver from 5.0 and running it in CURRENT (see below on 
> the 5.1->CURRENT transition), which almost worked. The driver recognized the 
> card and got loaded, but kept printing link up/down messages to te kernel log 
> (network traffic non-operational). I also tried commenting out the EEPROM 
> cheksum check in the new driver; it then failed upon reading the MAC address 
> claiming it was invalid.

Believe it or not, when when I run CURRENT with the normal driver (except
eeprom checksum check commented out) and *start XFree86*, the kernel seems
to try to load the em driver twice. The first one failes, and the second one
succeeds (based on kernel log output). After that I am seeing the same
behavior as I did with the 5.0-RELEASE version of the driver compiled into
the CURRENT kernel. I.e., I can ifconfig etc but no traffic comes through
and the driver perpetually says the link is up/down with an interval of a
few seconds.

Just to be clear: I boot, em0 is not recognized. I start X, and suddenly it
*is* recognized, but still doesn't work properly.

When the kernel prints the em0 info, I also get an error message about the
XF86 radeon driver running in kernel context 0... I'll post the exact
message if someone is interested.

> system has already booted, it works perfectly! I can hotswap back and
> forth without difficulties, I just can't boot with any card inserted.

This can seemingly be broken. After I experimented with the built-in
bluetooth card, the orinocco pcmcia card would no longer work. It would
still be recognized when inserted, but an ifconfig would hang the console
for a period while it prints a bunch of errors about timeouts. Rebooting
does NOT help (i.e., after reboot I would still not be able to bring
the orinocco interface up with ifconfig). However, after booting
back into WinXP and then into FreeBSD again, the pcmcia bahavior
was back to "normal".

> Similarly, when the internal Bluetooth card is enabled, I get the same
> kernel trap during boot sa I do with a PCMCIA card inserted, even though I
> believe the Bluetooth card is on the USB bus.

Apparantly I can enable/disable the bluetooth card AFTER boot, and it will
be successfully detected on the USB bus; and no crashing occurs. (Whether it
actually works for use I have not yet tested.)

-- 
/ Peter Schuller, InfiDyne Technologies HB

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