[Gllug] n00b alert ;-) - Device Driver -> Segfault :-(

[Matthew Palmer]

Greetings list :-)

Whilst not green with GNU/Linux I'm still feeling my way round.  Just so 
that you know I'm not a genius ;-)

My problem:  My distro of choice is SuSE Linux and I'm currently using 
version 7.3.  I have an ADSL connection which currently runs off of a 
Alcatel Stingray USB device which I'd like to replace with a Dabs PCI ADSL 
Modem (Conexant chipset - drivers by ITeX).  In preparation for compiling 
the source code drivers (of which more in a minute) I've downloaded and 
(eventually successfully ;-)) compiled/installed a SuSE 2.4.16 Kernel from 
one of the SuSE FTP mirrors.  The Kernel is compiled with only needed 
drivers and optimised for the AMD K6 CPU in that PC.  The PC boots fine as 
far as I can see with no error messages.

The Modem drivers supplied on the CDROM with the modem are set out for Red 
Hat 7.1 and Kernel 2.4.3.  The Makefiles list kgcc as the compiler target 
and non-existent (on SuSE anyway) directories as the targets for the 
compiled binaries and the odd script.  I've modified the compiler target to 
gcc rather than kgcc, created the target directories (I'll link to the 
files from a more appropriate location) to enable the make and install 
process run.  I also modified the target for the Kernel revision.  After a 
"make all" and "make install" the result is a Kernel module in the 
lib/modules tree and several binaries in /usr/bin for managing the 
modem.  Using insmod to load the Kernel module results in a insmod error 
after which any command results in a Segmentation Error.  It is impossible 
to salvage the system and a hard reboot is required.

My question is has a change been made to the Kernel since 2.4.3 which makes 
the driver fail when compiled for 2.4.16 i.e. I'm wasting my time on 
this?  Do the processor type targets need to match from the Kernel to the 
driver - Kernel=k6 Driver=i486?  Are there any snippets of logfiles I can 
post which would help identify the root cause (pun intended ;-) ) of the 
problem?

The topic of using these drivers did crop up on the Linux forum of 
ADSLGuide recently but I'm not sure what I'd doing differently from the guy 
who did get it working.

Many thanks for your time :-)
Matthew Palmer.


-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at linux.co.uk
http://list.ftech.net/mailman/listinfo/gllug