(ohci_hd) Sierria Wireless 595 PCMCIA card fails to load

[Lance French]

Binary package hint: linux-source

Hardy Heron / Alpha 6
Linux 2.6.24-12-generic #1 SMP Mon Mar 10 14:33:08 UTC 2008 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Sierra Wireless AirCard 595 with a Sony Vaio VGN-SZ650N laptop.

Upon inserting the sierra card:

[ 234.760236] ohci_hcd 0000:0a:00.0: OHCI Host Controller
[ 234.760262] ohci_hcd 0000:0a:00.0: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 8
[ 242.753636] ohci_hcd 0000:0a:00.0: USB HC takeover failed! (BIOS/SMM bug)
[ 242.753650] ohci_hcd 0000:0a:00.0: can't setup
[ 242.753659] ohci_hcd 0000:0a:00.0: USB bus 8 deregistered
[ 242.753769] ACPI: PCI interrupt for device 0000:0a:00.0 disabled
[ 242.753774] ohci_hcd 0000:0a:00.0: init 0000:0a:00.0 fail, -16
...

The card is never made available to the OS.

[Lance French (lancefrench)]

From google (http://www.pbandjelly.org/2006/12/sierra-wireless-aircard-595-configuration-sprintpcs/) I see that the Sierra Wireless card has been made to work as far back as Ubuntu 6.10, so I suspect this is more laptop hardware related than pccard related.

[js1 (sujiannming)]

Same problem with a Verizon PC5750 EVDO card. I'm running Kubuntu 7.10 amd64 and I also tried Kubuntu 8.04 beta live CD. It seems like ohci_hcd just doesn't like working in the 64-bit environment.

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

Is this symptom still reproducible in 8.10 or 9.04?

[Javier Jardón (jjardon)]

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to "New". Thanks again!

[brainjuice (z-launchpad-jm-themitchells-us)]

It should be noted that this is the same as Bug 291653 ( https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/291653 ). I posted in that thread the following as well:

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Do we know which version of the Kernel will be used in 9.10?

Although I am primarily an Ubuntu user, I have participated in tracking down the same issue on the Suse bugzilla forums: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=407592

It is important to track this issue down as it appears as though it is a kernel issue that affects the whole Linux community. I also want to make sure that Ubuntu 9.10 is based off of a working version of the kernel as I like many others are dead in the water with our wireless modem cards, even with Ubuntu 9.04.
-------------- SNIP ------------------

The basic issue turns out to be a change in the kernel (though not completely confirmed) that causes 64-bit Linux with 4+ GB of ram to not properly hand of PCI devices to the rest of the OS.