Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

Last year at LCa 2006 I had two guys take five minutes of their time to help me get my work laptop on the wifi, a process which included one of them lending me his PCMCIA card (that didn't require firmware) so that I could download the firmware for my inbuilt card. I've forgotten your names, whoever you were, but you guys rocked. And I've told the story many times to illustrate why groups of hackers getting together can achieve things that would take a single person a lot of work to troubleshoot.

This year I've had similar experiences. The first one was getting my DVD drive set up to use DMA. On the Intel 82801 ICH7 family of ATA bridges, it supplies a SATA interface for the hard disk and a PATA for the DVD. Unfortunately, the standard ATA driver doesn't interface with this combination correctly and doesn't enable DMA on the DVD drive (or allow you to set it via hdparm). To fix this, put the following incantation on the end of your kernel line in your GRUB configuration file (for me on Fedora Core 6, that's /boot/grub/grub.conf):

kernel ... combined_mode=libata hdc=noprobe

The other was finally getting CPU frequency scaling working on my Intel Core 2 Duo. It's an unfortunate but now well-known bug that the Fedore Core 6 anaconda installer will not correctly work out what type of chip this is. It therefore thinks that you need the Pentium (i586) kernel rather than the Pentium II and later (i686) kernel. Since Pentiums didn't come with frequency scaling, the kernel package doesn't include the necessary kernel objects for speed stepping. You'll know if this applies to you with the following command:

rpm -q kernel --queryformat "%{NAME} %{RELEASE} %{ARCH}\n"

The third column will have the architecture - standard rpm and rpm -qi commands won't tell you this. uname -a will tell you i686 even if the kernel is i586, so don't believe it. To download the new kernel version, use:

yum install kernel.i686

I think that you have to do some special magic to get it to install the i686 architecture of the same version. As of my writing, it picked up the 2.6.18-1.2868 version of the i686 and installed that beside the 2.6.18-1.2869 version already installed. Yum won't correctly replace the i586 architecture version with the i686 architecture version if it's the same release number, as far as I know. I don't know what you do in this case.

Of course, while you're running the current working kernel, download all your kernel-specific packages for things like wireless networking support. These you have to download the RPMs from your local mirror and install manually, because it's currently running a different kernel and yum will only install packages for that. Of course, if your ipw3945 driver is compiled from source, you'll have to make that clean and compile it and the ieee80211 module from scratch again. Take it from me, there's some weird voodoo to get this working that took me a day to correctly incant.

Then you should have an acpi_cpufreq.ko module installed and be able to use one of the CPU speed regulator daemons. I think I have both installed somehow, which means they're probably fighting it out or something. Go me. Still, I can blog about it, which hopefully means that Google will index it and someone else will learn from my mistakes. That's the only reason I'm doing this, you know.