HP Pavilion / ATI 200M Random Crashes - was: [Suspend bug]

[David G. Miller]

oleksandr korneta <atenrok at gmail.com> wrote:

> alright, I decided to go wired, and see what happens. So it has been 
> almost two weeks since I turned my wireless card off and deactivated the 
> wlan0 device and guess what - no crashes since then. So I claim that the 
> combination of ndiswrapper + x86_64 windows wifi drivers make my laptop 
> to crash 1-2 times per day.
>
> Any suggestions?
I signed up for and started a thread on the ndiswrapper mailing list... 
which died after a very few exchanges.  I am seeing *EXACTLY* the same 
behavior on my HP Pavilion laptop with the ATI 200M chipset running FC6 
x86_64.  The following is with a wired connection:

[root at fubar ~]# uptime
 19:43:11 up 6 days, 11:59,  5 users,  load average: 0.16, 0.15, 0.07
[root at fubar ~]# uname -a
Linux fubar.local.davenjudy.org 2.6.19-1.2911.fc6 #1 SMP Sat Feb 10 
15:16:31 EST 2007 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

I think my last reboot was just to pick up the 2911 kernel.

If I bring up the wireless connection, the system kernel panics in no 
more than 24 hours.  This seems to be independent of whether there is 
traffic on the connection and whether the authentication is WEP or WPA.  
The only advice I got from the ndiswrapper list was to make sure the 
kernel isn't compiled with 4K stacks which doesn't even appear to be an 
option for the x86_64 FC kernel.  That is, the x86_64 kernel DOES NOT 
use 4K stacks.

I'm going to try the bcm43xx driver again to see if it now works with my 
AP.  When I was running WEP on the AP, the AP wouldn't authenticate back 
to my laptop before bcm43xx timed out (funny thing was the next message 
after the timeout was a message saying that an authentication had been 
received but none were outstanding).  I switched the AP to WPA radius so 
maybe it will authenticate to my laptop before bcm43xx times out.  
That's about three or four projects down my "to do" queue.

If bcm43xx doesn't work for you, you might try getting on the 
ndiswrapper mailing list (very low traffic compared to fedora-list) and 
posting your complaint.  Maybe, if enough people independently document 
the problem, one of the ndiswrapper folks might decide it really is a 
problem.

Cheers,
Dave

-- 
Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.
-- Ambrose Bierce