[hsflinux] modprobe of hsf modules brings system to its knees

[Josh Green]

I sent this originally when I was not yet subscribed to the hsflinux
list (but thought I was, due to the long delay for receiving the
subscription confirmation), it therefore needed moderator approval. I
decided to resend and add some additional information. Please disregard
first message if it ends up being approved, thanks.

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I have a Dell Inspiron 5150 laptop with an HSF Conexant modem:

Output of applicable portion of 'lspci -v':

0000:00:1f.6 Modem: Intel Corp. 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M)
AC'97 Modem Controller (rev 01) (prog-if 00 [Generic])
        Subsystem: Conexant: Unknown device 5422
        Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 7
        I/O ports at b400
        I/O ports at b080 [size=128]
        Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2

I'm using latest Gentoo with kernel 2.6.7-gentoo-r11, latest Linuxant
driver hsfmodem-6.03.00lnxt04072900full.tar.gz with a paid license. 

After performing hsfconfig, the hsf modules are loaded and everything
works fine (can connect to Internet, etc). If I reboot the computer and
log in to my gnome session the system rapidly becomes unusable as severe
hard disk thrashing occurs. Starting a top session in a text virtual
terminal before logging into gnome (good luck trying to run top after
system starts to go down hill, system is too slow by that point!) shows
that modprobe is consuming 100% CPU. Eventually (within 10 to 20
seconds) I am forced to use Sys-Request keys to sync/remount/reboot
machine. System is to the point of virtually non-responsiveness (hard
drive going nuts). I verified that it was the hsf modules by moving the
misc/ directory (containing only hsf modules) out of the kernel modules
directory, and then moved it back in after logging into gnome and
running wvdial (which caused the same problem to occur again).

UPDATE (from first posted email):

I did some additional tests by manually modprobing modules. I began with
"modprobe hsfengine" which worked fine. I then did a "modprobe
hsfmc97ich" which never returned from the modprobe command and system
went down hill from there. Hitting CTRL-C at the terminal printed out a
message that said something to the effect of "Could not load
hsfpcibasic2 due to unresolved symbols" although that wasn't the exact
phrase, since I have no easy way of copy/pasting it, but modprobe
command still did not end. Deleting the misc directory and re-running
hsfconfig will cause things to work fine again, until reboot.

Another problem I saw was that after a few hours of system up time after
hanging up the modem, the kernel disabled IRQ 7, due to a spurious
interrupt. Unfortunately this made it so the modem would no longer
respond at all, and broke my sound card too which is using the same IRQ.

Has anyone else experienced these problems? This modem has been a
nightmare to begin with (although its fine when I can get it to work), I
wish it was working better with 2.6 kernels. Best regards,
	Josh Green