Rafał and John,
I was doing routine testing today on 3.0-rc4 kernels built from wireless-testing
and Linus's mainline git tree. To my surprise, I noticed an important difference
on the netbook with a 14e4:4315 BCM4312 802.11b/g LP PHY device. Although b43
would work OK with light loads, it would always fail at heavy loads. Sometimes,
it would get the "Out of order TX status" failure, and sometimes it would just
lose the connection. As that machine is quite slow, I maintain its kernel source
on an NFS volume exported by an x86_64 machine with fast CPUs and relatively
fast disks.
Until today, the BCM4312 had never been able to complete the "make
modules_install" step needed to get a new kernel on the netbook, and would fail
in the middle of copying the modules from the NFS volume to the local
/lib/modules tree. After installing the wireless-testing 3.0-rc4 kernel using
rtl8187 as the network driver, I was quite surprised to find that the new kernel
could use b43 to install the new kernel from Linus's tree. After booting that
kernel, the failure returned.
I then made other load tests on the w-t kernel without failures.
There are no real differences between the b43 sources in the two kernels. There
are lots of changes associated with the bus reorganization; however these do not
seem to cause the problem.
Only one of the patches to ssb seems to be the "fix", namely commit eb40e3e8
entitled "drivers/ssb/driver_chipcommon_pmu.c: uninitilized warning" by Connor
Hansen. I need to do more tests on this patch, but the kernel from Linus's tree
could reinstall itself when I added this patch. I see no indication in the
commit message regarding pushing this one to stable, but I think it should go
upstream to mainline and the stable trees.
Larry
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