Two possible, maybe, could-be kernel bugs

Speaking of the kernel, I find I have a couple of issues that may or may not actually be problems. Errors.

Bugs! There, I said it.

First, I came across another axnet-based PCMCIA card and feeling adventurous, I gave it a try. If you remember from the past year, just about everything axnet-driven I have used in the PCMCIA category has either fallen silent when traffic peaked at a certain level, or caused lockups or metaphorical digital explosions.

But this one was free, and seeing as I had the Mebius as a completely different platform, I thought I’d give it a try.

And, as you might have predicted, I got the same unwanted results — lockups on data transfers, system-wide freezes, and so forth. Different laptop, different card, different phase of the moon, but same software and therefore … ?

The other one is likewise related to specific, out-of-date hardware, and quite possibly even more esoteric since it doesn’t have the “flexible” flavor of a PCMCIA network card. I have caught a string of problems that seem to be caused by the Trident framebuffer module, although its behavior lately has been better than even just six months ago.

In this case, issuing a halt or reboot command does neither. but spatters pixellation here and there on the screen and usually locks the system entirely. This is happening for me in both archlinux-i586, and with custom systems in Crux.

If I build a kernel and deliberately omit any and all support for that particular module, things seem to work as normal. And given the similar issues I had with that Thinkpad back in January, I am again left with the different-hardware, same-software situation.

If I can find a proper venue, I’ll probably do as much as I can to file bug reports. But I might be one of the last people on the planet using this stuff, so I don’t expect much.