512MB/1GB RAM & Wireless Card

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

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

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.