[Prism54-users] SMC2835 stopped working, how to troubleshoot?

[Karl-Heinz Herrmann]

Hi,

On Tue, 3 Feb 2004 20:25:37 +0100
Dirk <dirk@bigengineer.xs4all.nl> wrote:

> Hi all. Out of the blue my wlan stopped working. I don't have a clue
> what the cause can be. Until now it worked without a problem. (almost)
>[...]
>
> How do you troubleshoot such a problem? I only have 1 AP and 1 wlan
> card. I only use linux on the laptop, so there is no way I can test it
> with another system or OS. 

I had one die on me too. worked flawless -- then suddenly it worked
flawless for 30 seconds and would refuse any further connection. LED
blimking, frequencies cycling, just no data transfer whatsoever. 
I realised it was working long if I'm in a cold room and that it was
rather warm (not hot!) when taking it out. Putting it in the freezer
first and run the fans full speed on the lap (no CPU eating stuff
running) gave me 3-5 min before break down. I got a replacement from SMC
and I've picked up on the grapevine (newsgroups) the SMB2835 might have
a temp. problem.

I suggest: try some temperature depending testing (freezer). put it in
until it stops working, freeze it try again. If it's behaving
temperature dependent call SMC.


> But...I read my logs just to make sure there is nothing wrong and I
> see some things that I didn't saw yesterday. 
> This is a part of the kern.log:
> Feb  3 19:01:13 CB1 kernel: Assuming someone else called the IRQ
> Feb  3 19:35:45 CB1 kernel: eth1: timeout waiting for mgmt response
> 1000, trigging device Feb  3 19:35:46 CB1 kernel: eth1: timeout
> waiting for mgmt response Feb  3 19:39:55 CB1 kernel: eth1: resetting
> device... Feb  3 19:39:59 CB1 kernel: eth1: mgmt response not
> collected Feb  3 19:48:14 CB1 kernel: eth1: timeout waiting for mgmt
> response 1000, trigging device
> 
> debug:
> Feb  3 18:55:37 CB1 kernel: eth1: prism54 driver detected card model:
> SMC2835W Feb  3 18:56:06 CB1 kernel: eth1: islpci_open()
> Feb  3 18:56:06 CB1 kernel: eth1: resetting device...
> Feb  3 18:56:06 CB1 kernel: eth1: uploading firmware...
> Feb  3 18:56:06 CB1 kernel: eth1: firmware uploaded done, now
> triggering reset... Feb  3 18:56:53 CB1 kernel: Assuming someone else
> called the IRQ Feb  3 18:56:55 CB1 last message repeated 20 times
> Feb  3 19:01:13 CB1 kernel: Assuming someone else called the IRQ
> Feb  3 19:01:13 CB1 kernel: Assuming someone else called the IRQ
> Feb  3 19:35:45 CB1 kernel: eth1: timeout waiting for mgmt response
> 1000, trigging device Feb  3 19:39:55 CB1 kernel: eth1: resetting
> device... Feb  3 19:48:14 CB1 kernel: eth1: timeout waiting for mgmt
> response 1000, trigging device
> 
> Especially the assuming line is new to me. 

The spurious interrupts are strange -- I can't confirm if I had this
output in my logs -- the got too large and are gone. Anyway at that time
I was still running the old isl-driver (pre prism54) so the output
might not be comparable.




K.-H.