Comment 54 for bug 204996

I added the rt kernel as Jim March suggested, and it seems to have worked for me. I haven't been able to see this kernel lockup. I may have noticed something interesting about why my particular system was hanging:

In Gutsy, my wireless card, Linksys WMP54G v4.1, with the RaLink RT2561/RT61 802.11g PCI chipset, was detected and worked out of the box, but would randomly disconnect and refuse to reconnect. When I upgraded to Hardy beta, my card worked and I never observed this bug, but it was replaced with the hard lockups, after about the same amount of network usage. Now, with the realtime kernel, I don't see hard lockups, but I do see the original bug from Gutsy again.

Hypothesis: For all three cases (Gusty desktop default kernel, Hardy beta generic kernel, and Hardy realtime kernel), my wireless card works but fails after some data is transferred (this is discussed in bug 134660). For Gusty, or 2.6.24-16-rt, the kernel stays up. For Hardy's kernel (2.6.24-16-generic), the wireless failure results in a hard lockup.

I'm not sure how to verify this or if it's important to do so, but that's where I am now.