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I have an older HP laptop model 17-bs019dx, https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c05531010, that's been successfully dual-booting Slackware 14.2x64 with its pre-installed Windows since purchase in Oct 2017. In particular, its wireless networking has been working flawlessly. No problems whatsoever. Until...

...I just recently tried installing slackware-current64 (Changelog.txt dated 6/21/22, which creates a bootable usb install stick that says "Welcome to Slackware 15.1"). And the installation itself went fine and dandy, at least as far as I could tell, just like various others I've done. After completing the install and exiting setup, I re-booted from the newly-installed 15.1 partition, and everything still looked fine. And everything stayed fine up until the moment I ran /sbin/dhcpcd to start up networking.

Then voluminous error messages started appearing in /var/log/messages and /var/log/syslog, literally about 100MB every second, continuously. Here's a small sample...

from /var/log/messages...

Jun 22 09:31:06 psi9star dhcpcd[1290]: wlan0: adding address fe80::5a03:68d4:3db9:77ad
Jun 22 09:31:07 psi9star kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1c.5: AER: Corrected error received: 0000:00:1c.5
Jun 22 09:31:07 psi9star last message buffered 3 times
Jun 22 09:31:07 psi9star kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1c.5: AER: can't find device of ID00e5
Jun 22 09:31:07 psi9star kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1c.5: AER: Corrected error received: 0000:00:1c.5
Jun 22 09:31:07 psi9star kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1c.5: AER: can't find device of ID00e5
Jun 22 09:31:07 psi9star kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1c.5: AER: Corrected error received: 0000:00:1c.5
Jun 22 09:31:07 psi9star kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1c.5: AER: can't find device of ID00e5
Jun 22 09:31:07 psi9star kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1c.5: AER: Corrected error received: 0000:00:1c.5

and from /var/log/syslog...

Jun 22 09:31:06 psi9star dhcpcd[1290]: control_open: Connection refused
Jun 22 09:31:07 psi9star kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1c.5: PCIe Bus Error: severity=Corrected, type=Physical Layer, (Receiver ID)
Jun 22 09:31:07 psi9star kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1c.5:   device [8086:9d15] error status/mask=00000001/00002000
Jun 22 09:31:07 psi9star kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1c.5:    [ 0] RxErr                 
Jun 22 09:31:07 psi9star kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1c.5: PCIe Bus Error: severity=Corrected, type=Physical Layer, (Receiver ID)
Jun 22 09:31:07 psi9star kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1c.5:   device [8086:9d15] error status/mask=00000001/00002000
Jun 22 09:31:07 psi9star kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1c.5:    [ 0] RxErr                 
Jun 22 09:31:07 psi9star kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1c.5: PCIe Bus Error: severity=Corrected, type=Physical Layer, (Receiver ID)
Jun 22 09:31:07 psi9star kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1c.5:   device [8086:9d15] error status/mask=00000001/00002000
Jun 22 09:31:07 psi9star kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1c.5:    [ 0] RxErr

Note that I don't think that "Connection refused" at the beginning of syslog means anything, since I hadn't yet edited /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf or the several /etc/rc.d/.conf files (rc.wireless.conf and rc.inet1.conf) needed for wireless networking (so, e.g., it didn't know my wireless router's password).

The one thing I could think of to try was the old dhcpcd from 14.2x64. That's dhcpcd-6.8.2 whereas current64 is dhcpcd-9.4.1. But exactly the same thing happens regardless of version used, exactly the same error messages, character-for-character (except, of course, the timestamp). But besides just ignorantly trying that, I don't really understand what those error messages are trying to tell me. The only "pcie" lines from dmesg are...

[    0.428065] pcieport 0000:00:1c.0: PME: Signaling with IRQ 122
[    0.428128] pcieport 0000:00:1c.0: AER: enabled with IRQ 122
[    0.428419] pcieport 0000:00:1c.5: PME: Signaling with IRQ 123
[    0.428475] pcieport 0000:00:1c.5: AER: enabled with IRQ 123

which, unfortunately, also doesn't mean much to me. So I'm hoping somebody can suggest what else to try, or what other info to look at and post, or any other suggestion.

Although, again, note that networking had been working flawlessly under Slackware 14.2x64 since 2017, and continues to work when I boot the pre-installed Windows. So I don't think there's any actual hardware problem on the HP laptop. And I also installed Slackware from that very same usb stick, dual-booting with pre-installed Windows on a Teclast F5R laptop, https://www.gizmochina.com/product/teclast-f5r-laptop/. And networking on that laptop works flawlessly, so Slackware's working fine with that Teclast F5R hardware.

I can only suppose that something's changed between Slackware 14.2x64 and current64, whereby something about the HP laptop's particular hardware is no longer being detected/recognized/whatever. But I have no further idea what that might be, or what to try doing about it. Thanks for any help.

eigengrau
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    that's not dhcpd, that's your hardware. "AER: Corrected error received: 0000:00:1c.5 Jun 22 09:31:07 psi9star last message buffered 3 times" that's actively a hardware error (errors in the transmission of signals between PCIe devices and a PCIe switch / root complex) – Marcus Müller Jun 23 '22 at 10:16
  • Thanks, @MarcusMüller But how can it be an actual hardware problem when networking still works fine when I reboot the machine into its pre-installed Windows? Also, it had been working fine under Slackware 14.2, just hours before I installed 15.1. But I put 15.1 on 14.2's partition, so can't easily re-verify it's still working under Slackware (though it would be awfully coincidental if that hardware failed just as I was installing a new Slackware version). Is there any way a hardware problem could affect Slackware networking, but not affect Windows networking??? Thanks, again. – eigengrau Jun 23 '22 at 15:08
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    it might be just an issue of it not being reported under an older kernel, who's simply oblivious to it? – Marcus Müller Jun 23 '22 at 15:19
  • Thanks again, @MarcusMüller Okay, so if that's the case, it must be a "non-fatal", so to speak, hardware problem. That is, networking still works despite whatever the problem is. So then all I'd really need to do is turn off all that voluminous error reporting. I'd tried killing the syslog process, but then all those GBs of errors showed up on the screen (stdout or stderr, I suppose). Is there any way to configure (some .conf file to edit) something-or-other to completely and totally ignore those errors? – eigengrau Jun 23 '22 at 15:32
  • @MarcusMüller Thanks to your comments, I tried googling for a way to suppress the messages, and immediately found https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/327730/ which suggests "the kernel option pci=nommconf". I'm not with that laptop at the moment, but will try it when possible, and post another comment reporting the outcome. – eigengrau Jun 23 '22 at 16:07
  • @MarcusMüller Yup, "the kernel option pci=nommconf" (added to the append= line of /boot/efi/EFI/Slackware/elilo.conf) immediately cleared up the problem entirely, and networking is now working fine, and without any "complaints", with current64 slackware. Thanks a lot for your help, pointing me in the right direction. – eigengrau Jun 24 '22 at 05:20

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