F16 system crashes after 3 hours operation - rtl8192se wireless driver?

[hm_shurt]

With a new Fedora 16 x86_64 install on my Toshiba Satellite L510, I am experiencing system crashes after very approximately 3 hours of operation from boot time. The system just quits leaving the screen frozen and no reaction from mouse or keyboard, indicating most likely a stopped kernel. I checked the logs... nothing unusual at the time of the crash. Memory tested OK too.

I used the same machine with no problem using Fedora 15, which uses a 2. series kernel - Fedora 16 uses the 3. series kernel.

After some observations and tests, my suspicions are on the Realtek 8192se wireless driver for the 3. kernel. I am currently running the system with the suspected driver rmmod'ed and a Liinksys USB wireless adapter in place, and so far so good after 5 hours of operation.

As I don't have the skills or time to do a valid examination to make a bug report, I am just flagging this here in case someone else has similar problems and wants to do a more thorough examination.

[hm_shurt]

Finally I did file bug 753233 on this rtl8192se driver issue. It appears that the problem has been known upstream in the linux kernel group for a couple of months already. See http://groups.google.com/group/linux...279467b40b7f58 . All the same, the buggy driver is now in a "stable" version of the kernel, go figure!. We seem to be waiting for Realtek to come up with a solution. I have tried to compile the latest Realtek driver, but the compile fails with errors on my system.

---------- Post added at 11:31 AM ---------- Previous post was at 11:11 AM ----------

Thanks to Matteo Filipetto's patch to the source (http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.lin....general/78707), I got the compat-wireless driver module for 3.1.1 from wireless.kernel.org to compile. I am now running it and we shall see how stable it is for me.

[chuma]

I seem to be having the same problem with my Lenovo ThinkPad Edge 15" AMD. With F15 before the official driver landed in the kernel, I was using the r8192se driver from Realtek (v0019.1207.2010-1) with decent results - certainly no crashes, but that driver was very chatty in dmesg.

From the lkml thread you linked to, it looks like I will be going back to it... downloading it from here:

http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/...true#RTL8192SE

[hm_shurt]

Chuma, please post your results. I had difficulties with the compilation of that module on kernel 3.1.1 . I had been using their modules successfully for some time on series 2 kernels though, before the module got incorporated in the kernel package.

[hm_shurt]

For the record, the compat-wireless rtl8192se driver module for 3.1.1 from wireless.kernel.org also has the crashing problem when compiled with kernel 3.1.1 . I am not sure anyone has a solution for this yet, but it is a nasty bug... worse when there was no driver at all for this rtl8192se hardware, since it brings the kernel down without notice. I am disabling this driver whenever a new kernel gets installed until we find one that works, and using a USB wifi adapter (that has a different chip) to connect to the network.

[chuma]

3.1.2-1 did not fix this.

Bug https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=753233 is the report for this, and the last comment on it says it may be addressed by https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=755154

And #755154 was closed today with updates to kernel-3.1.5-1.fc16 and 2.6.41.5-1.fc15 pushed to stable.

Booting right now and can't wait to get rid of this ethernet cable!

Update ran for almost two hours last night on WiFi with 3.1.5 and no crashes!

[hm_shurt]

This problem appears to be solved in Fedora since kernel 3.1.5 .