Bug 134790
| Summary: | Inspiron 8500 practically hangs when configuring b44 NIC with 1.5G memory | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Product: | Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 | Reporter: | John Haxby <jch> | ||||
| Component: | kernel | Assignee: | John W. Linville <linville> | ||||
| Status: | CLOSED ERRATA | QA Contact: | Brian Brock <bbrock> | ||||
| Severity: | high | Docs Contact: | |||||
| Priority: | medium | ||||||
| Version: | 4.0 | CC: | barryn, davej | ||||
| Target Milestone: | --- | ||||||
| Target Release: | --- | ||||||
| Hardware: | i686 | ||||||
| OS: | Linux | ||||||
| Whiteboard: | |||||||
| Fixed In Version: | RHSA-2005-514 | Doc Type: | Bug Fix | ||||
| Doc Text: | Story Points: | --- | |||||
| Clone Of: | Environment: | ||||||
| Last Closed: | 2005-10-05 12:30:26 UTC | Type: | --- | ||||
| Regression: | --- | Mount Type: | --- | ||||
| Documentation: | --- | CRM: | |||||
| Verified Versions: | Category: | --- | |||||
| oVirt Team: | --- | RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host: | |||||
| Cloudforms Team: | --- | Target Upstream Version: | |||||
| Embargoed: | |||||||
| Bug Depends On: | |||||||
| Bug Blocks: | 156322 | ||||||
| Attachments: |
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This sounds like bug 118165 (or a variant thereof). That was a useful hint. I took the patch from bug #118615 and I'm now up and running. The final comment: > Just a status update, the fix is in 2.6.9-rc2-mm2 (bk-netdev.patch), > hopefully will propagate to the Linus (and thus Fedora) tree > soon. suggests that a fix is on its way. When it hits the RHEL4b1 kernel I'm ready to try it out. We have included everything in 2.6.9 into B2. Please retry when its available in a few weeks. I await the new kernel with bated breath. However, in the 2.6.10-rc1
changelog I notice:
----
<pp.fi>
[PATCH] b44: use bounce buffers to workaround chip DMA
bug/limitations
Signed-off-by: Pekka Pietikainen <pp.fi>
----
A quick look at the corresponding code for this change shows that this
is indeed a fix for the DMA problems I experienced. Is this the fix
that will be in the new kernel?
Finally got around to testing this. Sorry. There's good news and bad news: kernel-2.6.9-1.648_EL and kernel-2.6.9-1.675_EL both appear to run without problems. Both kernel-hugemem-2.6.9-1.648_EL and kernel-hugemem-2.6.9-1.675_EL both hang; the former hangs when configuring eth0 (b44) and the latter hangs during the udev device initialisation when the b44 module is first loaded. A quick look at the kernel source shows that the fix for this problem didn't make it into the new kernel (unless I've missed it). You can see this in the diffs for 2.9.10-rc1. I think the link is http://www.kernel.org/diff/diffview.cgi?file=%2Fpub%2Flinux%2Fkernel%2Fv2.6%2Ftesting%2Fpatch-2.6.10-rc1.bz2 (the diffviewer isn't working at the moment). Just look at the diffs for b44.d and there's a comment in there about DMA above 1G not working for some hardware. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 145109 *** Ooop...bug 145109 is for Fedora...reopening... Created attachment 113632 [details]
jwltest-b44-bounce-bufs.patch
Pre-built test kernels are available here: http://people.redhat.com/linville/kernels/rhel4/ Please give them a try and report the results. Thanks! I can confirm that kernel-2.6.9-6.41.EL.jwltest.20 works for me. An advisory has been issued which should help the problem described in this bug report. This report is therefore being closed with a resolution of ERRATA. For more information on the solution and/or where to find the updated files, please follow the link below. You may reopen this bug report if the solution does not work for you. http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2005-514.html |
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-GB; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040806 Description of problem: This is a very odd problem. When I first installed RHEL4-b1 on my laptop on a spare disk it installed and booted just fine. I had 768Mb memory. Subsequently I got a 1G memory stick (so I now have a total of 1.5Gb memory) and I decided to re-install to choose a different disk layout. The installation went swimmingly until it came to rebooting for the firstboot run. The first thing I noticed was that it was taking a very long time to configure the network. I rebooted and brought the machine up without the "quiet" and "rhgb" options. The machine appeared to hang at the point at which it attempted to configure the network driver (a Broadcom 93406 which uses the b44 driver). I say "appeared to hang" because hitting "x" (say) eventually echoed the character to the screen some tens of seconds after hitting the key in question. Interestingly, in its normal guise (with the usual disk), this machine is running a stock 2.6.8.1 with the acpi-20040816-26-stable-release patches and it's just fine. When I boot the machine with the RHEL4b1 kernel (2.6.8-1.528.2.10) and start bringing up services one by one, it is fine until I attempt to run ifconfig on the newly loaded b44 module. Even more interesting, the leds on the back of the laptop didn't appear to light up at all. If I remove the 512Mb memory stick, everything is fine and dandy -- well, at least the network works. Perhaps interestingly, a collegue who has an identical machine running FC2 2.6.8-1.521 kernel has the exactly the same problem when he has 1.5Gb memory installed. It's going to be interesting getting an updated kernel on to this machine as I don't really want to keep levering memory out, but I really do want to get a fix and I'm happy to install any test ternel or run some kind of diagnostics as this is pretty much a showstopper for me. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Boot 2. Wait for network configuration Actual Results: Observe machine essentially hung Expected Results: No hang :-)