[CentOS] CentOS 5 and ndiswrapper

Tue May 1 21:30:09 UTC 2007
David G. Miller <dave at davenjudy.org>

This is an abbreviated version of an e-mail that I also posted to the 
ndiswrapper mailing list.  Compressing the long story, I ran into the 
same problem using CentOS 5 as I had with Fedora Core 6 and ndiswrapper: 
my laptop (HP Pavilion zv6000 series with a Broadcom BCM43xx wireless 
NIC) would lock up or spontaneously reboot after a few hours if I 
brought up the wireless interface.  I also tried using the native 
bcm43xx driver but the system wouldn't even boot.  On a whim, I tried 
the current "plain vanilla" kernel (2.6.21) from kernel.org.  My laptop 
has been up and stable running the 2.6.21 kernel with the wireless NIC 
up using ndiswrapper ever since.

Does anyone have any idea why the un-patched kernel from kernel.org 
works fine with ndiswrapper but both the FC6 and CentOS (RHEL) kernels 
lock up or spontaneously reboot?  I built the 2.6.21 kernel by copying 
the config file for 2.6.18-8.1.1 from /boot and doing a "make 
oldconfig".  Everything is x86_64.

Cheers,
Dave

P.S. Frosting on the cake: the secure digital card reader built into the 
laptop also works with the 2.6.21 kernel.

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