device soft reset timed out

Past few days have been a lot of fun.

I bought 2 SMC2802W.  Installed the first one without
any problems, second one was a real pita.

Both machines were running RedHat 9, kernel upgraded
to 2.4.25.  Upgraded wirless tools to v26 and
recompiled with wireless headers v16.  First one
worked great without any real problems.

The second one gave the 'device soft reset timed out'
error fairly consistently.  I also saw a line similar
to "SIOCSIFFLAGS: no such file or directory" echoed
during the boot process when the card was trying to
come up.  This did not make it to dmesg.  It works
now, so I can't duplicate that.  ifconfig ethX
sometimes showed an empty MAC, sometimes the default
MAC that the driver sets early in the process.  

The machine in this case is a rather old Dell, P75. 
Frankly, I would have given up and tossed the machine,
except it seemed to be a problem for several people,
so I figured it must not be specific to the hardware.

Switched cards first, card #2 worked in machine #1 and
card #1 did not work in machine #2.

Tried several different firmware files and a couple of
versions of hotplug agent.  No luck.

I tried some suggestions that I ran across in other
places to increase the timeout including 'echo 100 >
/proc/driver/firmware/timeout' and a change in
islpci_dev.c to increase the wait time.  No luck.

Last resort was to revert to an earlier version of the
driver.  Downloaded prism54-cvs20031221, compiled,
installed.  The card fired right up on reboot.  No
problems at all.  iwconfig ethX did not act just
right, I was not able to change any of the parameters.
 'iwpriv ethX reset' fixed that.  Not sure what the
deal was, but it works now.

My take on this is something has gone wrong somewhere
between 20031221 and current.  It is not consistent --
perhaps related to a PCI bus that is not quite up to
2.2, or maybe a slower processor?  I have not tried
any revisions between 20031221 and current, so I'm not
sure exactly where the problem starts.  I need a few
days to recover from this, then maybe I'll give it a
try if that has not already been answered.

I have seen similar problems posted by others here. 
One thread looked like someone was working on a solid
fix, but it seems to have dropped off.  Is this an
ongoing discussion??

I'm hoping someone is taking this up.  There are
obviously some things that need fixed in the version
that I am using now.  I would be glad to help in any
way that I can, even to the point of breaking this
machine again.  Not sure how much help I could be with
the code, drivers are a bit out of my league, but I
guess this might be a good time to learn if that's
what needs to happen.

Sorry for the lengthy post.

John Lewis


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