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amilo-a laptop lockup netcard problem

DISCUSSION Freyr Gunnar Ólafsson 1 participant 1 message Jan 16, 2003

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Good sirs and ladies of the linux kernel development mailing list.

I am in desperate need of your help. I am no expert, but you *are*. Problem is as following:

Problem
I have a fujitsu siemens amilo a laptop.
My father gave it to me after having saved for god knows how long.
I can NOT give it back and tell him that it has a problem with the linux kernel (or that the hardware is faulty). So if this can be solved (as I am sure it can) then nobody has to know ;)

amilo a has a RealTek RTL8139 netcard build in to the motherboard.
Almost every single linux distro out there crashes when I boot it from the install cds (FreeBSD however does not seem to have any such problems... hint... hint :)

After trying almost any distro on the planet I finally came back to the old faithful.. slackware. For some reason the bare.i kernel boots just fine. However as soon as I tried to autoprobe the netcard is gave a kernel panic as well as some memory adresses (which I will give at the bottom of this letter). Aparently it crashed when trying to modprobe for the de4x5.o netcard module. Thankfully slackware offers a way to skip a probe for a particular module (network; S de4x5.o) and then the autoprobe program found a working driver (apparently since slackware is running now with network support working).

I tought that I might compile a new kernel for my laptop since there was very little hardware support in bare.i kernel that came with slackware (sound support for the sound chip, scsi etc.). I have tried so many different kernel combonations that my hands are bleeding and the arrow buttons are smoking ;(

The only thing that I notice different was when I disabled isa-plug-and-play support for my new kernel it managed to boot just a little bit further I think, although the kernel still paniced and gave those same memory adressess.

Booting kernel message

Here is some the the kernel messages. I will only write the last few lines before the kernel crashes (since I assume only those are nessicery ..... and my fingers are still bleeding ;þ

-------------------------------------
Starting PCMCIA services:
cardmgr[49]: watching 2 sockets
cardmgr[49]: Card services release does not match
cs: IO port probe 0x0c00-0x0cff: clean
cs: IO port probe 0x0800-0x08ff: clean
cs: IO port probe 0x0100-04ff:<0>CPU 0: Machine Check Exception: 0000000000000 007
Bank 3: b40000000000083b at 00000001fc0003b0
Kernel panic: Unable to continue
--------------------------------------

The bare.i kernel from slackware that boots so well is a 2.4.18
The kernel I tried to compile so often was a vanilla 2.4.20 kernel.
The install cd's that I tried where gentoo live-cd 1.4rc2, red-hat 8 standard, rootlinux. They all exploded (paniced) on ignition :(

here is stuff from lspci list (I really don't know what information would be helpful for you poeple so if there is anything that I should do or if there is a procedure for info I should include please tell me)

lspci
--------------------------------------
00:00.0 Host bridge: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device cab0 (rev 13)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 700f (rev 01)
00:02.0 USB Controller: Acer Laboratories Inc. [ALi] USB 1.1 Controller (rev 03)
00:03.0 Modem: Acer Laboratories Inc. [ALi] M5457 AC-Link Modem Interface Controller
00:04.0 IDE interface: Acer Laboratories Inc. [ALi] M5229 IDE (rev c4)
00:06.0 Bridge: Acer Laboratories Inc. [ALi] M7101 PMU
00:07.0 ISA bridge: Acer Laboratories Inc. [ALi] M1533 PCI to ISA Bridge [Aladdin IV]
00:08.0 Multimedia audio controller: Acer Laboratories Inc. [ALi] M5451 PCI AC-Link Controller Audio Device (rev 02) 00:09.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C (rev 10)
00:0a.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): VIA Technologies, Inc. IEEE 1394 Host Controller (rev 46) 00:0b.0 CardBus bridge: ENE Technology Inc: Unknown device 1420 (rev 01)
00:0b.1 CardBus bridge: ENE Technology Inc: Unknown device 1420 (rev 01)
00:0f.0 USB Controller: Acer Laboratories Inc. [ALi] USB 1.1 Controller (rev 03)
01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4336
--------------------------------------

Please return true;

Freyr Gunnar Ólafsson
gnarlin at utopia dot is (sorry bout that)