512MB/1GB RAM & Wireless Card

512MB/1GB RAM & Wireless Card

[Peng Li]

If you are impatient to read this message, please jump to the middle
to see the exciting part.

Machine: IBM X31 2672E4U, P-M 1.4GHz, BIOS 2.01a, 1GB RAM(512MB DIMMx2)
OS:      Linux 2.6.0-test9, Gentoo Linux

Problem: I installed an Dell Truemobile 1150 MINI PCI wireless card (a
rebranded orinoco gold) on this machine and it didn't work.  The card
worked perfectly in Windows, but when I use it in Linux, the PCMCIA
driver could not find the device.

The card bus seemed to work well: it was recogonized as a PCI device,
and yenta_socket was loaded without any problem.  However, cardctl
reported that there was no card in the slots. Here are the info:

http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~lipeng/x31info/1G.NOHIMEM.cardctl.txt
http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~lipeng/x31info/1G.NOHIMEM.lspci.txt
http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~lipeng/x31info/1G.NOHIMEM.dmesg.txt
http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~lipeng/x31info/

I exhausted the combination of (bios_version, kernel_version,
kernel_param) and spent several days trying to get it to work.
Totally frustrated.  All the options such as CONFIG_NOHIGHMEM,
CONFIG_HIGHIO, ... were attempted.  Finally I opened the my laptop
trying to reprogram the wireless card with my screwdrivers and
hammers...

 *********** EXCITING PART HERE ************

IT WORKED!!  When I unplugged one DIMM of the memory and boot it
with 512MB of memory, it worked perfectly without any problem:

http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~lipeng/x31info/512M.NOHIMEM.cardctl.txt
http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~lipeng/x31info/512M.NOHIMEM.dmesg.txt
http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~lipeng/x31info/512M.NOHIMEM.lspci.txt

But when I used it with 1GB RAM again, the card mysteriously
dissappeared.  All the kernel options doesn't seem to help.  Even I
boot the kernel with mem=256m, the card still didn't work unless I
physically unplug one DIMM of memory. Compiling the kernel with 4GB
support doesn't seem to make a difference.

So what's the problem?  Is it a bug in the kernel or am I doing
something stupid?  Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

  -- Peng

Re: 512MB/1GB RAM & Wireless Card

[Joshua Kwan]

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On Tue, Oct 28, 2003 at 01:45:54AM -0500, Peng Li wrote:
> Problem: I installed an Dell Truemobile 1150 MINI PCI wireless card (a
> rebranded orinoco gold) on this machine and it didn't work.  The card
> worked perfectly in Windows, but when I use it in Linux, the PCMCIA
> driver could not find the device.

Always the same first question: was CONFIG_ISA enabled in your .config?
It's what I needed to do to get my Orinoco to work under Linux.

Interesting that it worked when you unplugged the RAM, but I don't see
an immediate correlation.

-- 
Joshua Kwan

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Re: 512MB/1GB RAM & Wireless Card

[Peng Li]

Yes, I have CONFIG_ISA=y.  I put my kernel config at

http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~lipeng/x31info/config.txt

The only thing I noticed is that in the dmesg, there is a error
message:

   PCI: Cannot allocate resource region 0 of device 0000:02:00.0

But this message is still there when I unplugged the RAM and the card
is working fine.  

For the kernel, what is the difference between these two situations?

*   1GB RAM, boot with mem=512M
* 512MB RAM, normal boot 

It is not likely to be a hardware issue, since the card works fine with
1GB of memory in Windows XP.


On Mon, Oct 27, 2003 at 11:26:45PM -0800, Joshua Kwan wrote:
> 
> Always the same first question: was CONFIG_ISA enabled in your .config?
> It's what I needed to do to get my Orinoco to work under Linux.
> 
> Interesting that it worked when you unplugged the RAM, but I don't see
> an immediate correlation.
> 
> -- 
> Joshua Kwan