iwl4965 errors under load

[Sean Dague]

Ubuntu 7.10 x86, all updates applied. Hardware is a Lenovo T61p.

I use backuppc to do nightly backups over rsync of 1/2 dozen machines. For this laptop, this means it pounds the wireless interface at night, sucking down ~ 20 GB of data over it. More often than not this will reset the wireless with the following error in dmesg:

[45262.460000] iwl4965: Microcode SW error detected. Restarting 0x2000000.

Wireless doesn't restart after this. In order to get wireless back you must rmmod iwl4965 then modprobe it again.

[Jeffrey Baker (jwbaker)]

I have the same hardware and this happens to me constantly. iwl4965 is very unstable and often reports this error. The workaround, to rmmod/modprobe iwl4965 results in a hard system lock or spinning in ksoftirqd about 20% of the time.