Arch Linux

khordes

Member

Registered: 2007-06-23

Posts: 22

2.6.25 experiences + iwl4965 annoyance solved

Hi all, just spent the better part of an hour messing with this problem so I thought I'd share what I learned.  In testing out the 2.6.25 kernel after its move to core I found that most things operated normally, a few tweaks had to be done to my sound set up and glxgears is frozen, though it shows FPS, and compiz works just fine so my hardware acceleration must be working (NVIDIA 8600.)  The only major issue I had was my intel iwl4965 wireless card would freeze the whole system when I turned it on with the kill switch.  I was able to narrow this down to only happening when X was running, which is definitely odd.

When  I turned it on, it seemed to work fine, when I brought the wlan0 interface down my mouse would begin to operate VERY choppily and my everything.log complained of an IRQ problem and that IRQ 10 had been disabled.  It also suggested I should try irqpoll as a kernel option on boot.  If I then flipped the kill switch on the 4965 to off it would freeze my system requiring a hard reboot.  After a bit of fiddling I figured out that this problem did not occur when running from a VC with no X session.  What I ended up doing to solve this was switch to the wireless-compat pkg in AUR, I had to change the date of the package to the 26th, as the last update to it was from the 24th, but it built fine and installed fine.  Not having done something like this before I copied the original iwl4965.ko to a .bak file, and copied the one in updates over to the originals location, rebooted, and I haven't had a problem since, I've turned on and off the wireless card 3 times so far in X with no IRQ errors, slow mouse, and definitly no lock ups.  Not sure if that was the right way to handle the updated module?  I can scan for available networks and pick them up just fine, though my situation precludes me from trying to connect to any of them.

This is mostly in case anyone is having the same problem as me, hopefully it can help someone out.  Any thoughts are, of course, welcome as well.

jpatufet

Member

From: Spain

Registered: 2007-11-28

Posts: 11

Re: 2.6.25 experiences + iwl4965 annoyance solved

Hey, I think I'm having the same problem with iwl4965.

In local I shutdown my wifi, I usually don't need it. But today I've turned it on and gnome get frozen. I couldn't restart X, and had to restart it. I have an NVIDIA8400, may be it's important.

Now I am on examns, after them I would try to see what it is.

PS Now I downgrade to 2.6.24, maybe I need wifi and now I don't have time to mess with that

Last edited by jpatufet (2008-05-28 18:42:29)

jb

Member

From: Florida

Registered: 2006-06-22

Posts: 466

Re: 2.6.25 experiences + iwl4965 annoyance solved

Mind posting the laptop model?

While glxgears does the same thing here with the gears locking up but reporting the fps correctly (and games still run normally), I didn't have any problems with my iwl4965 card; no X lock-ups here.

Mine:
Dell XPS m1330, nvidia 8400m

---

...

khordes

Member

Registered: 2007-06-23

Posts: 22

Re: 2.6.25 experiences + iwl4965 annoyance solved

My GLX gears was locking up but that was a seperate issue for me.  My Laptop is a Toshiba Satellite X205, NVIDIA 8700M GT is my graphics card.  I do think the complete freeze of my computer had something to do with the interaction of the wireless driver and the nvidia driver, because I would get NVM stack traces right before complete freezes (I think those are NVIDIA related, kind of guessing though)  After solving the wireless freezing issue, I fixed the glxgears frozen problem by rebuilding the mesa package using ABS and the suggestions on this bug report: http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/10500, specifically the comment from  Attila unsetting CFAGS and CXXFLAGS.  This has solved the issue for a few others, by the looks of it, so if you are having that problem, definitly worth a try.