[gentoo-amd64] Re: 2.6.16 and ndiswrapper

[Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net>]

Karol Krizka posted <200603251257.53037.kkrizka@gmail.com>, excerpted
below,  on Sat, 25 Mar 2006 12:57:40 -0800:

> On Saturday 25 March 2006 06:35, Mark Haney wrote:
>> I just pulled down 2.6.16 from ~amd64 and now my ndiswrapper doesn't
>> work. I rebuilt the module and loaded it, the card is installed and
>> driver is present, but it's not allowing me to configure it at all.  Is
>> anyone else having this problem.
>>
> I haven't upgraded to 2.6.16 yet as I am waiting for the suspend2-sources to 
> be bumped to that version. But I use the same drivers with ndiswrapper, so I 
> am interested in hearing how you solve this problem.

I've had more issues with .16 than with anything for awhile, rcs included.
I caught one issue early enough (rc1) that I got it bugged and the
triggering change was rolled back, at least for .16 release.  There's an
earlier thread about it (the one I started, dealing with the dead keyboard
on .16-rcs). They haven't traced why it happened yet, tho, only what
triggered it, only in theory what triggered it shouldn't have anything to
do with it, and release was due, so they rolled back the change, or more 
precisely, it's still there but requires a kernel command line option to
activate, so it won't trigger the bug for anyone without the option, but
those with the issue that lead to the change (generally those running KVM
switches that had mouse issues after switching back to earlier kernels)
can still use the command line option to fix their issue.

I only found another late in the cycle, when I upgraded to 8 gigs of 
memory from 1 gig.  .15 and stable releases thereof work.  .16 doesn't.  I
haven't had time to trace that one further, however, and it's possible I
just don't quite have the kernel configured correctly and .15 just happens
to work anyway.  This issue has to do with SATA, actually, I think SCSI. 
With 8 gig of memory I'd normally configure IOMMU on but that doesn't work
with .15 or .16.  With it off, .15 works, but .16 fails when it tries to
load the (libata based therefore SCSI based) SATA RAID, saying the SCSI
device nodes don't exist!  My root is on RAID so this is early kernel,
where it first tries to load SCSI-then-RAID-then-rootfs-read-only, so it's
well before anything userspace side is running, so it /has/ to be a
kernel issue.  There's a changelog entry saying they eliminated
bounce-buffers for SCSI that I think is the problem, since bounce-buffers
are >4 gig memory related, but as I said, I haven't traced it yet, so I
can't say for sure.  On the one above, I would have guessed something to
do with the keyboard driver changes but to both my surprise and that of
the devs it was the mouse driver changes that did it (I got it down to a
single line, without which it was fine, with which I had no keyboard at
all, and that line was in the psmouse changes, /not/ keyboard), so I'm
being cautious in my attribution of this one.

Of course, from some of the comments I've seen, .15 was the bad one for
others, so who knows, but anyway, I'm not surprised to see that .16 is
causing issues for others, since it has caused me a lot of grief here, as
well.  (This is vanilla Linus mainline kernels off of kernel.org.)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman in
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html


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