ndiswrapper eats (too many) cpu cycles

English Network/Internet
#1

Hi

I have installed SuSE-11.1 on an ASUS Eee Box PC (205) and almost everything appears to work fine. So far so good. The Box has an integrated WLan which is using a ndiswrapper driver.

lspci | grep Network
03:00.0 Network controller: RaLink RT2860

dmesg | grep -E '(ndiswrapper|wlan)' | sed -e '/^SFW2/d'
ndiswrapper version 1.53 loaded (smp=yes, preempt=no)
ndiswrapper: driver rt2860 (Ralink Technology, Corp.,11/15/2007, 1.01.00.0000) loaded
ndiswrapper 0000:03:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 17 (level, low) -> IRQ 17
ndiswrapper 0000:03:00.0: setting latency timer to 64
ndiswrapper: using IRQ 17
wlan0: ethernet device 00:15:af:dc:6a:20 using serialized NDIS driver: rt2860, version: 0x0, NDIS version: 0x500, vendor: 'IEEE 802.11n Wireless Card.', 1814:0781.5.conf
wlan0: encryption modes supported: WEP; TKIP with WPA, WPA2, WPA2PSK; AES/CCMP with WPA, WPA2, WPA2PSK

The problem is:

top shows that a process named ntos_wq is eating continuously a few percent of the cpu cycles:

 973 root      15  -5     0    0    0 R    4  0.0  39:54.08 ntos_wq

This happens even when the WLan is not in use. ntos_wq is ndiswrapper. Is this a bug or a feature or a stupid installation error of me?

#2

vodoo wrote:
>
> This happens even when the WLan is not in use. ntos_wq is ndiswrapper.
> Is this a bug or a feature or a stupid installation error of me?

It probably is a bug in the Windows driver. It is the one that is continually calling
ndiswrapper.

Unfortunately, that device (1814:0871) is not supported in the latest wireless code - the
stuff that will be in 2.6.32.

#3

Hi

Thanks a lot. I guessed it could be somthing like this. I will go the quick and dirty way and disable the driver completely by default to fire it up manually just when wifi access is needed.