pcmcia + acpi + suspend2 seems impossible...

[Matt Price <matt.price@utoronto.ca>]

Hi folks,

in an ideal world I would like a kernel that does these things:

- loads and unloads my pcmcia NIC/wlan cards flawlessly
- suspends to disk without any issues
- lets me use and program all the special laptop keys on my keyboard
(sleep, screen, volume controls, and ESPECIALLY poweroff/lid events) 

Since I'm using an ibm600e, for these I need pcmcia + cardbus support,
acpi, and the suspend2 patch, all in a recent kernel with the most
current version of the ibm-acpi module.  

So far I haven't been able to get all three of these together in one
kernel.  Suspend2 doesn't appear to be a problem -- though after I
apply the suspend2 patch I generally have to uncheck a bunch of
extraneous module options in menuconfig.  Suspend2 + pcmcia almost
works for me; currently my main problem is that, *SOMETIMES*, after
suspension, I get this:

kernel: unregister_netdevice: waiting for eth0 to become free.  Usage count = 5

after which eth0 (a pcmcia NIC) is dead till reboot, and in fact even
rebooting is blocked by this persistent message, which fills up my
kernel log at intervals of 1 to 15 seconds.

I have googled on this and apparently it's some kind of kernel bug --
or at least, it is an error reminiscent of bugs filed against earlier
kernel verisons, 2.6.0, 2.6.10, and others.  Kernel bugs are rather
beyond my competence, so I've just decided to live with this for now,
because I need the recent kernel version (2.6.14 or better) for my
ibm-acpi... 

... which unfortunately, completely breaks the cardbus support!  I
wrote about this issue in a previous mail (Message-id:
<[🔎] f22f52180511070852p3e7cfa02n98fb9839e434f7e9@mail.gmail.com>).  After
a LOT of recompiling, it seems to me that I simply cannot get acpi to
work on my machine without breaking pcmcia.  Since pcmcia is
more essential than acpi, and I can get some of what I want from acpi
out of suspend2, I am going with the almost-functional suspend+mcmcia
for now...  But I would REALLY like to have all three!  So I was
wondering if anyone out there could help me, e.g. with:

- a kernel config that gets all three working on an x00 thinkpad
- intimate knowledge of the kernel, sufficientt o see the problem and
tlel me how to fix it
- advice on whether this problem constitutes a kernel bug and where I
might file such a bug (or what kind of testing I should do first).  

Thanks much as always!

Matt

--------------------------
 .''`.       Matt Price 
: :'  :      Debian User
`. `'` 	     & hemi-geek
  `-     
--------------------------