Ndiswrapper modprobe and random freezing fix

[transform100]

Hello my RTL8185 built in wireless combined with Ndiswrapper will cause the system to completely lock-up when doing modprobe ndiswrapper or just randomly. I spent months trying to find out the cause, it turned out to be the fact that the Fedora kernel uses 4k stacks and some wireless cards need more and that the fact that Fedora/Redhat doesn't consider this a bug "Please go file a bug report in hope of getting this fixed". here is a small how to on how to fix this:

You can use this kernel if you want it should be much faster then compiling, it may not be up to date if it isn't add a reply and I'll recompile a fresh one or you can compile it with the info below.

How to install: extract the archive open terminal cd the directory you extracted it to and type:

rpm -i kernel-firmware-2.6.*.rpm
rpm -i kernel-2.6.*.rpm
rpm -i kernel-devel-2.6.*.rpm

You will also need to get the latest version of ndiswrapper from the svn and do make, make install

2.6.27.9-159 up to date as of Jan 7 2009 for "i686 systems only"
http://rapidshare.com/files/18082878...ks.tar.gz.html
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=LB14WD27

I'm not responsible if you screw up your system with the files provided or with the info!

------------------------------------------------

Use this guide to compile a kernel http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=141782
and read this to fix the kernel-firmware dependency problem http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showpo...&postcount=108

When you get to the part where you do "make menuconfig" go to kernel hacking and uncheck 4k stacks instead of 8k or something like that, save as /root/config just like it says in the guide.

If someone needs me to go into more detail I will just hit me a PM or reply or something.

[sideways]

or use x86_64 fedora and 64bit driver

[andamaru]

Thank you This was the only thing holding me back from using Fedora. This has been locking my system for many versions of Fedora. Have you already submitted a bug?

[transform100]

Yes I have sent in a bug report but they don't seem to care https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=479093 please do open another one if you want.

[andamaru]

Originally Posted by transform100

Yes I have sent in a bug report but they don't seem to care https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=479093 please do open another one if you want.

you need to submit the bug to rpmfusion, ndiswrapper isn't part of fedora so, they won't fix it. The open source driver doesn't work the best for me, but it's under development so it should get better soon. Thanks for the Linux to the 64-bit driver, if the open source one doesn't improve I'll just download the 64-bit version of fedora.

[sideways]

It's not a bug, Fedora has been using 4k (kernel) stacks in 32bit since the beginning (iirc) rather than the traditional 8k stack. Fedora and Linux developers have no control over how windows drivers are written and it just happens that some of them cause stack overflows with ndiswrapper. In some cases not even 8k stacks are enough and you need 16k stacks, there is a patched kernel downloadable from linuxant.com.

Fedora will never change the stack size to fix a problem caused by proprietary drivers.

Some drivers like broadcom bcmwl5 work fine and others (many realtek ones) don't.

In 64bit x86_64 you have 8K stacks by default, and even though the 64bit process will require more memory in the stack than the corresponding 32bit process it's not double, and so you have more space to work with on the stack.

see also:
http://lwn.net/Articles/150580/
http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/8/3/2
http://www.mailinglistarchive.com/fe.../msg69861.html