More on that interesting (but failed) attempt to get a Debian 2.2.18pre kernel Toshiba Laptop to talk with its PCMCIA network card at the ALUG Chevely meet last Sunday...

First: an interrupt clash problem. Resolving that didn't help. One interesting workaround not tried was a recompile of the stock kernel / pcmcia-cs, including the ``irq_mode=0'' hack for PCI TI bridges (older versions of pcmcia-cs). Should have looked at the more recent release notes: (ain't hindsight wonderful!)

The current version of PCMCIA-CS code on sourceforge is 3.1.31 (1st Jan 2002) Too recent for the 2.2.20 kernel.org kernel, even if it had been included...

Not being PCMCIA orientated, I wasn't aware that this stuff is not a regular feature included with the kernel.org kernels.

But - I expect to be futzing around with a Dell 2500 PCMCIA NIC "Real soon" - so thanks to all those that advised. Forewarned is forearmed...

Here is a compendium of useful resources, found from:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=PCMCIA+Linux+Kernel+patch&btnG=...

Linux Kernel PCMCIA support resources; see:

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/kernel/pcmcia/

( Text Listing of contents follows )

pcmcia-cs-?.?.?.tar.gz PCMCIA Card Services for Linux. If there are several versions here, the latest may not be stable yet.

CHANGES History of changes to pcmcia-cs package

PCMCIA-HOWTO How to install and configure Linux PCMCIA support

SUPPORTED.CARDS Listing of all cards supported by the current release.

diffs/pc-?.?.?-?.?.?.diff.gz Patches for the PCMCIA package. These patches exclude some things in the doc subdirectory, because PostScript and dvi files are hard to patch efficiently.

OLD/ Various past versions of the PCMCIA package.

NEW/ Things that have not been thoroughly tested yet.

doc/ Formatted (dvi and PostScript) versions of the PCMCIA-HOWTO and the Linux PCMCIA Programmer's Guide.

contrib/ Drivers contributed by other people, which are not included with the core PCMCIA distribution.

extras/ Extra packages that add functionality to the PCMCIA package. Currently, this directory contains the Forms Library (a GUI toolkit used by the PCMCIA control panel utility "cardinfo").

Other interesting links and information:

Juan-Mariano de Goyeneche's Links to Key Documents for understanding the Kernel http://jungla.dit.upm.es/~jmseyas/linux/kernel/hackers-docs.html

SWSUSP Suspend (no need of APM) and PCMCIA Warning / gcc version sensitivity http://falcon.sch.bme.hu/~seasons/linux/swsusp.html

The PCMCIA-CS sourceforge direct links:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pcmcia-cs/ http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=2405&release_id=67...

http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=67945 ( Contents here as plain text ):

Release Name: 3.1.31

Notes: This release has some fairly important bug fixes. Most important, if you run an SMP kernel, then the 3.1.28 and 3.1.29 releases were completely broken for you. This is fixed in 3.1.31, as is a bug that prevented PnP BIOS support from working with SMP kernels.

This release should also no longer require the ``irq_mode=0'' hack for PCI card readers using TI CardBus bridges. Unfortunately, the hack is still required for Ricoh bridges because the interrupt tests done in the i82365 driver did not seem to always correctly deduce the right way to handle interrupts for these bridges.

I've also added a few more sanity checks to the Configure script to catch more common errors.

Changes:

[01-Jan-02] Version 3.1.31 -- Changed cardmgr, cardctl to report their version info, not the version of the kernel PCMCIA drivers, on 2.4.* kernels. -- Changed i82365 module to always trust irq probe on TI bridges. -- Added tests to Configure script for 2.4 kernel debug options. -- Added 'realclean' target to top level Makefile. -- Added Nextcom NC5310B support to fmvj18x_cs, from Komuro. -- Added tests for 'gcc' and 'make', and sanity checks for module install directory, to the Configure script. -- Fixed CardBus CIS memory window management bug, from Rick Sulack. -- Fixed memory_cs driver to not oops when a block erase is attempted on a non-block-oriented memory card. -- Fixed HWADDR parsing in network script to be language independent. -- Fixed 'probe' to check alternate location for ISA card readers. -- Fixed bad SMP breakage introduced in 3.1.29 release. -- Fixed PnP BIOS support to work on SMP kernels.

-=-=-=-=-

Anyone care to contribute additional links to material they found to be useful when fixing up PCMCIA issues?

--James