RTL8139 Cardbus Card fails to activate

Loren M. Lang lorenl at alzatex.com
Sat Dec 11 10:44:14 PST 2004


On Fri, Dec 10, 2004 at 06:49:10PM +0100, Jan Christian Meyer wrote:
> On Fri, 10 Dec 2004, Lowell Gilbert wrote:
> 
> > Jan Christian Meyer <janchris at stud.ntnu.no> writes:
> >
> >> I upgraded my laptop (Fujitsu-Siemens Lifebook C4355) to 5.3 this week,
> >> and had the same problem. My card started working when i disabled ACPI. I
> >> don't have a sufficiently pointy hat to tell you _why_ this happened...
> >> It shouldn't be like that, separate parts of the system, mumble grumble,
> >> but in the spirit of empirical observation: It Worked For Me.
> >
> > Separate parts of the system?  Hardware discovery and Cardbus?
> 
> As stated, I'm not deeply into how it all fits together, so I'm
> observing purely as an end-user. The "separate parts" I was referring to
> are the state of ACPI and whether or not the rl driver sets my card up to
> shovel packets.
> 
> The network card does not fail without ACPI, and ACPI does not miss the
> network card when it isn't there. Under 5.1 and 5.2.1, I could switch
> either of these on and off without the other emitting any distress
> signals, and there was no problem.
> 
> Together with the facts that they have separate on/off toggles, and that I
> perceive them to do different things for me, this makes me consider them
> functionally independent features, whether or not their implementations
> are related on a lower level of abstraction. (They apparently _are_ related,
> as one makes the other fail.)
> 
> > Those seem about as closely related as any two features could be...
> 
> I don't find this to be obvious at all, but it's good that someone does.
> May I trouble you to shed some light on the matter, or provide me with a
> reference?

ACPI is Advanced Configuration and Power Interface, it is a newer
interface to discover the hardware in a system and power management.
ACPI is only optional, hardware can be discovered by different means,
PCI and some ISA devices can be discovered, other ISA devices can easily
be guessed, like serial ports, but both ISA and PCI have different
interfaces, ACPI provides help from the bios to discover all hardware in
a unified way, including devices like serial ports that normally just
need to be guessed.

> 
> Cheers,
>  -Jan Christian
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