Sony Ericsson GC85 GPRS/EDGE pcmcia card

[M. Warner Losh]

In message: <4245DEE6.9000505 at modula.no>
            Espen Tagestad <espen at modula.no> writes:
: Some data: I'm running 4.11-STABLE on a Acer Travelmate 630 series 
: laptop. The output from pccardd from startup shows this line after 
: adding the sio-device as a generic modem:
: 
: sio2: unable to activate interrupt in fast mode - using normal mode

That always happens with pccard.

: When trying to do some activity on the network after connecting this 
: messages shows up in my log:
: 
: sio2: xxx more interrupt-level buffer overflows (total xxx)
: 
: (xxx is a number)

That's because you have a slow machine :-(.  Its interrupt latency is
too large.  You're best bet is to hack sio.c to have a lower interrupt
threshold.

: I've read a lot of documentation on the net about this issue, and I 
: think I've tried most of the tips and tricks suggested. I tried to 
: change the irq assigned for the card without luck, I have set the 
: cp4ticks to 4096 in sio.c (that removed the interrupt-level buffer 
: overflows in the log, but then network still don't work as it should), I 
: changed the list of available irqs in pccard.conf, and I really don't 
: know what to do next.

What does it mean 'network doesn't work'.

: The irq seems to be hardcoded to 3, but in Windows it shows up with irq 
: 7, which in the FreeBSD log I get a message like this: stray irq 7. The 
: card works well in Windows, so I don't think is a hardware problem.

Yes.  We use pci interrupts when we can with oldcard.  One can use
other kinds of interrupts, but I doubt that will help too much...

: Does anyone have any tips or suggestions on how to get this card to work 
: properly with FreeBSD? Has anyone managed to get this card, or some of 
: the other Sony-Ericsson GC-cards, to work at all with FreeBSD?

Hacking sio.c is your best bet.  If you can service the interrupts
fast enough, and get the data into ppp, it should work.  If you are
getting the data and the network isn't working, then you'll need to
diagnose why.

: PS. The reason why I don't run FreeBSD 5 is that it just don't work on 
: thia laptop at all.

bummer.

Warner