Re: [patch] first pass at gnome-keyring support, baby.

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Thu, 2005-06-23 at 12:22 -0400, Robert Love wrote:
> #1 sounds like me.  I have the right firmware.  It works in Netapplet
> but it could just be behavioral differences that induce it in
> NetworkManager more readily.
> 
> I'll get backtraces next time it happens.  I got some last night (not
> saved, sorry) and it was a lot of spinning in mutexes.
> 
> But then I cannot "modprobe -r airo" so I suspect the card is to blame.
> And NetworkManager won't shutdown (stalls on waiting to deactivate the
> airo).  And if I kill it and restart, scanning does not work.
> 
> So...while there may be NM issues, sounds like my card sucks the ass of
> a wolverine.  But odd that Netapplet had no problems.

Netapplet doesn't have problems because it doesn't talk to the card
much, it just does a few iwconfigs and some scanning.  NetworkManager is
touching the card quite a bit, in regular intervals, and probably
exposes more bugs in drivers because nobody's really automated wireless
stuff like this before in Linux.

I hear you've got a little bit of kernel experience here and there, want
to take a look at the driver? :)

When I was looking at it, what I described was more or less the sequence
of events.  The card gets wedged for some reason, but the driver keeps
sending the card packets for a bit.  Each packet that the kernel network
layer adds to the outgoing tx queue, it increments the module's
refcount.  Since the card never can send those packets, the refcount
never gets decreased.  I've seen the usage counts as high as 21 or 22
before.

I have no idea what gets the card into this state, it seems to be fairly
random how long it takes.  See issuecommand() in airo.c where the error
comes from.  The CLEARCOMMANDBUSY stuff doesn't seem to unwedge the
card.

Dan