[laptop-discuss] ndiswrapper with BCM4306 loses downstream functionality after a few minutes

[Brandon Barker]

Well, I should probably explain my entire experience just so everyone gets an idea of what is happening.  I installed nevada build 48 on my hp nx9500 after having used linux on it for some time.  Previously I used the linux ndiswrapper with no trouble at all.   After  installing solaris and the ndiswrapper (I downloaded a separate windows driver than the one I used in linux), things seemed to be fine, but after a while of using the wireless connection the system would hang and then reboot itself.  At the time I wasn't sure if these were the same windows drivers that I had used before (they had the same name), but luckily I backed up the ones I used in linux.

After reinstalling the ndiswrapper with the (apparently correct) drivers, things seemed to be doing better, at least for a while.  Now the system no longer crashes, but downstream activity nearly stops all together after several minutes of heavy downstream activity (like downloading some large file).  In fact, I thought it did stop all together, but if I try to SSH in to the laptop, I do eventually get a prompt (after about a minute).  When I do "ifconfig -a", it prints out the info for the device, but it hangs so I have to Ctrl-C to exit.  I can't use modunload to remove it either, and having ifconfig attempt to detach does nothing.  

I wouldn't mind running or writing a DTrace script if anyone has any suggestions, but I'm fairly new with dtrace and not really a kernel developer.  Just let me know what info you would like to see; I'd love to learn more about this as well as get it fixed.   If anyone has any ideas about a way to at least get it going again without rebooting the system, that would be a good temporary fix (and allow me to test more easily).

Also, if anyone knows of a good pcmcia NIC that will work well in both x86 and x86_64 modes (with a native driver) I'll probably go ahead and buy it.
 
 
This message posted from opensolaris.org