PCMCIA

After recompiling a kernel you have also to recompile the pcmcia-cs package that makes pcmcia on the aero work - says David Hinds, the author of the package.

So now after the patching and compiling of a new kernel, pcmcia has to be installed new. I did that from a fresh tarball of the pcmcia-package.

First lets get rid of some ballast: The old kernel-pcmcia-cs-package, by default installed by RedHat, is no longer needed. So I uninstalled it first:

rpm -e kernel-pcmcia-cs

I then installed the original pcmcia package by downloading the package "pcmcia-cs-3.1.25.tar.gz" by David Hinds from:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/pcmcia-cs/pcmcia-cs-3.1.25.tar.gz

Information about the installation can also be found in David Hinds Pcmcia-Howto at:

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/
HOWTO/other-formats/html_single/PCMCIA-HOWTO.html

I did choose this (older) package because the installation of the newest one (3.2.3) failed with RedHat 6.1 (think I need a new compiler version). I succeeded meanwhile with the newer package and RedHat 7.1. Anyway both packages worked great with the aero and both detect my network card correctly.

The installation went like

Copy the package into a directory f.i. /usr/src:

cp pcmcia-cs-3.1.25.tar.gz /usr/src

unpack the package

cd /usr/src/
tar xzpf pcmcia-cs-3.1.25.tar.gz
cd /usr/src/pcmcia-cs-3.1.25
make config

In the configuration-menu you can select "No" for card-bus support The aero has only a standard 16-bit pcmcia-slot, so you cannot use the 32bit-card-bus.

make all
make install

I then had to enable "pcmcia" as startup service in the Red Hat configuration tool "ntsysv".



There is also an configuration file that needs some settings:

/etc/sysconfig/pcmcia

On other systems it may be called /etc/pcmcia.conf.

The following settings worked for me:

PCMCIA=yes
PCIC=i82365
PCIC_OPTS=
CORE_OPTS=

The startup script for the service "pcmcia" lays in "/etc/rc.d/init.d/" so I had to change into that directory and command

./pcmcia

and use one of the then mentioned options (start, stop status, restart).

The BadRAM-options for the cardmgr

Then, according to Donald Gordon's mail, I also changed the the configuration file for the PCMCIA Card Manager.

It can be found at "/etc/pcmcia/config.opts"

I changed the lines

-------------------------------------------
# System resources available for PCMCIA devices
include port 0x100-0x4ff, port 0x800-0x8ff, port 0xc00-0xcff
include memory 0xc0000-0xfffff
include memory 0xa0000000-0xa0ffffff, memory 0x60000000-0x60ffffff

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

to:

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

# System resources available for PCMCIA devices
include port 0x100-0x4ff, port 0x800-0x8ff, port 0xc00-0xcff
include memory 0xb0000-0xb7fff
-------------------------------------------

Now check for the available memory with the command:

dmesg | grep Memory

If the answer is like:

Memory: 18432k/20416k available (944k kernel code, 412k reserved, 548k data, 48k init, 32k badram)

you have exactly 19,9375 MB RAM available. OK, thats not all the 20 MB but the maximum possible. And on such a system I didn't encounter any mystery system hangs again and had further no problems with the detection and hot-plugging of my pcmcia-cards.

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