seemingly random hald system freeze

[David Zeuthen]

On Mon, 2005-01-17 at 13:32 -0500, Emily Brantley wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-01-17 at 11:48 -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
> > On Mon, 2005-01-17 at 11:42 -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
> > > Does the problem go away? 
> > 
> > Might want to clarify you need to reboot to test it.
> > 
> > > Also, remember to move the appropriate
> > > .ko files back after this.
> > > 
> 
> that's brilliant, that's a great start because doing so fixes the
> problem !  two reboots confirms this.  so then after that, i moved the
> modules back and began to reinsert the ones i needed.  inserted the "b44"
> module for my Broadcom card  (lspci:  "02:01.0 Ethernet controller:
> Broadcom Corporation BCM4401-B0 100Base-TX (rev 02)") it instantly locked
> up !  so we know the exact problem module.
> 
> so... now what ?  thank you so much thus far
> 

That sounds good; I've indeed seen other bugs with the b44 driver. I
think
what we need to do is to blacklist the driver such that HAL doesn't try
to access the mii registers. This means that NetworkManager and other
things relying on HAL to give the link status wont work correctly, but
at
least HAL wont lock up your box.

The real fix would of course be to fix the b44 driver but that sounds
like a bit more work. I've also seen this issue with the sk98lin and
the atheros driver. The latter two issues were fixed by allocating the
memory for the mii ioctl()'s on the heap and allocating more memory
than was available (since I suspected a kernel bug doing memory
corruption). I think however it's more safe to blacklist the drivers
until they are fixed.

Another avenue to explore would be to use a feature from the 2.6.10
kernel - optionally of course, as a compile time option; I wonder if
that works for your system. Does the file (replace eth0 with the
name for your device using the b44 driver)

 /sys/class/net/eth0/carrier

change when you plug/unplug the cable?

Thanks,
David


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