From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040510 Description of problem: A fresh install of Fedora Core 3 is made on a Dell Inspiron 8600c laptop with a network card broadcom bcm4401. The card is identified during installation and the module b44 asigned to device eth0 via: alias eth0 b44 in /etc/modprobe.conf When the network is brought up, the systen hungs, with a process ksoftirqd/0 using 99% of the CPU. After a while, the network interface says (via system-control-network) that the network is up, but in fact it is not working, with a message Link is down in dmesg. The process ksoftirqd/0 continues using 99% of the CPU until rebooting Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kernel-2.6.9-1.667 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Do a fresh install of FC 3 2. The system hungs when bringing up the network or 1. Do a fresh install of FC 3 2. Choose to not bring up the network on boot 3. Use system-control-network to bring up eth0 Actual Results: The system hungs Expected Results: The network card works Additional info:
I have similar symptoms on a Dell 5150 except the symptoms did not start untill I upgraded memory from 1 to 2 G. rob
The network card works in the same system (Dell Inspiron 8600c) with SuSE linux 9.0 (it has a kernel 2.4.21) but hangs as shown above when using FC3
I get the same problem. I have a broadcom integrated network card of the same model and oddly enough I just upgraded to 1.5 gigs of ram recently. Is there a possible correlation?
is this any better with the 2.6.10 based update ?
I haven't tried that yet, I am going to try to take out a 512 stick of memory before I go about updating the kernel.
I am the original reporter, and I would like to specify that my system has also a large RAM: 2Gb. Perhaps this is he key to solve the problem.
I have tried compiling and installing the 2.6.10 kernel and was surprised to find that the b44 driver wasn't even installed when I booted into it. I haven't looked into reinstalling the driver, but obviously it wouldn't work. ;) I will try to take out a stick of memory next (bringing my total memory down to 1024 mb).
I can confirm that installing the 2.6.10 kernel DOES fix the problem. The driver needs to be reinstalled (at least for me), but once it was, everything worked very smoothly (even with the large amount of memory installed). Hopefully this bug will be fixed in the Fedora Core 4 release (that is, if it was a bug associated with that particular release). =) If anyone else would like to test it, you can, but as far as I am concerned, this issue is resolved.
I am the original reporter. I confirm that installing FC3 and upgrading the kernel 2.6.10 DOES FIX the problem. No matter the amount of RAM. The issue is resolved.
That is probably because the latest FC3 kernels have turned off 4G/4G memory split, which exposed this bug in the b44 driver. The driver itself still needs fixing, but this is an upstream issue?
An update has been released for Fedora Core 3 (kernel-2.6.12-1.1372_FC3) which may contain a fix for your problem. Please update to this new kernel, and report whether or not it fixes your problem. If you have updated to Fedora Core 4 since this bug was opened, and the problem still occurs with the latest updates for that release, please change the version field of this bug to 'fc4'. Thank you.
I have updated my FC3 from kernel-2.6.11-1.35_FC3 to kernel-2.6.12-1.1372_FC3. The PC now does not hung, but the network does not work. The update DOES NOT FIX the problem. Please turn off 4G/4G memory split again. Thanks in any case.
There is no 4G/4G memory split in Fedora kernels since about 6 months ago.
Do you get any error messages related to b44? Do tcpdump or ethereal show outgoing frames? Do the above tools running on a different host on the network show incoming frames? If either of the last two are true, then please attach some sample output. Can you elaborate on the problem? "The network does not work" is not overly useful by itself. :-) Thanks!
Closed due to lack of response. Please re-open when the requested information becomes available...thanks!