-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hello psyche-list, I've had a few problems with my ThinkPad 770ED in the Dock on my desk for a while. Recapping: I was stuck at the 2.4.18 kernel because everything newer that I tried hung when trying to initialize the Ethernet PCMCIA card. Further, I was unsuccessful in downloading and building a kernel that would initialize and use the Ethernet PCMCIA. No one was able to provide any pointers on what else I might try to correct or track down the problem. Using DMA access with the CD-R/RW drive in the dock worked beautifully -- most of the time. Unfortunately, every now and then, it caused a full system freeze. Disabling DMA to the drive seems to have eliminated the lockups, at the cost of the system clock losing 4-5 minutes when burning a CD-R or when verifying that a CD-R was correctly written. No one was able to provide any suggestions. The lightning bolt hit me the other day. This system is semi-retired. It sits on the dock all day every day. I do not actually *need* to have PCMCIA Ethernet. There are ISA and PCI slots in the dock! So, I went to CDW and plunked down $10 for a USR PCI Ethernet card that claimed Linux as a supported OS. I installed it in the third slot in the dock, removed the PCMCIA card, and re-booted (still 2.4.18). Things looked pretty good, except that any significant amount of Ethernet activity (like refreshing my VNC session) would hang the system. After much searching through logs, Google, and old neural pathways, I thought maybe to try a different PCI slot. I moved the card to slot 2, and the system no longer hangs! Further, I updated to and booted from the latest RH 8 kernel (2.4.20-27.8), which also worked just fine. One of the unexpected benefits of the new kernel is that the clock no longer loses time when I use the CD-R/RW drive. I have not yet tried re-enabling DMA to the drive. The only other remaining issue is new with the current setup. Although the system does not hang with Ethernet activity, /var/log/messages gets a *lot* of messages like: [datestamp] rwh kernel: eth0: Too much work at interrupt, IntrStatus=0x0001. [datestamp] rwh kernel: eth0: Too much work at interrupt, IntrStatus=0x0040. The second message seems to be the more "popular". Doing some Google searching, I was able to find several references to people seeing such messages, but no solutions. I was also able to find some discussion related to 2.5.N kernels. The problem appears to be related to the fact that Linux has decided to lump a whole bunch of things together on the same, single, IRQ. Looking at /proc/interrupts, I find that IRQ-11 is associated with aic7xxx, usb-uhci, usb-uhci, eth0, Texas Instruments PCI1250, Texas Instruments PCI1250 (#2). From the looks of this list, I'd say that it covered pretty much all of the devices in the Dock. Booting back into Windows (which I hadn't got 'round to blowing away), I ran the ThinkPad setup utility and tried to allocate additional interrupts to the Dock, but the option was disabled, even after I disabled a couple of things like the Infrared port and should have had at least 2 free IRQs. So, I'm at a loss as to how to clear this up. If it were just the messages, I'd ignore it. However, the only two bad CD-R burns I've had in many months appeared this week, being burned while there was significant Ethernet activity and lots of the "Too much work" messages. Also, large file copies via Samba/Ethernet seem to be quite slow (even though VNC session responsiveness appears to have become much improved). I have not dared try accessing the removable HD on the SCSI bus that shares the same interrupt. (Fortunately, I have a similar drive on another system, although it's running Windows.) Any ideas on the interrupt issue would be appreciated. I suppose now that I've dumped the PCMCIA, I could try the 2.6 kernel. Anyone know whether it might fix this problem? I also have downloaded Fedore Core 1 and burned CDs. I also have the Mandrake 9.2 on DVD glued to the cover of a pretty decent UK Linux mag. Anyone have an opinion on whether upgrading to one of these (or another distro) might help? Thanks! Ron. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP Personal Privacy 6.5.8 Comment: Until recently, the last PGP with full source disclosure. iQA/AwUBP/L1828pw+2/9pUJEQK4dACeLSGT/UMyUVlAMy7Oz9/kBStW1YoAoIXr QJAZgM5Hkjjq0OykCPE6lLsO =G98z -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- Psyche-list mailing list Psyche-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/psyche-list
