Aiee! Someone said my name!
radmanly said:
Does anyone know the default mode for the
ath driver?
This discussion reports getting the "hardware error; resetting" messages running in adhoc mode because the
"tx descriptor gets setup wrong." I didn't explicitly configure the mode when bringing up wlan0 so I assume it's operating in the default mode.
Is adhoc mode the default for the
ath driver?
(If you're out there Adrian Chadd, please have mercy on us and offer some guidance!)
Aiee, someone did say my name!
A 30 second update, since I'm currently supposed to be working (and work doesn't currently include "wireless hacking") :
* There's a -lot- of AR9285 fixes in the freebsd-head ath driver; so please update to HEAD to test before you do anything;
* No I won't be back-porting the fixes to -8 for now - -8 serves as a "comparison" to how things were in the past - the -8 code works for some users and doesn't work for others, so -HEAD should (should!) work for more users and not suddenly break for existing working users.
* No I won't budge from that, not for now. What I can do later is post instructions on how to build the -HEAD ath driver for -8, that's how I do my testing.
Now:
* I've just committed something to -HEAD to fix the fatal error you've seen. The bus timeout interrupt isn't handled as an error by the HAL so it should just be being ignored. I'll likely add some statistics soon so we at least count those errors.
* When you're doing testing, please disable power saving (powerd) and re-test. I know that power saving mode for the AR5416 and later chips (ie, everything that's 11n) is incomplete. I don't have the time at the moment to implement all the power saving fixes from ath9k, I'm sorry.
* And IIRC the default mode is station, not adhoc.
You can check this by "ifconfig wlan0", it'll tell you the wlanmode if it's not station.
Further technical questions should be posted to
freebsd-wireless@freebsd.org. I'm thankful that someone contacted the list with some technical information. I'm currently unable to really help users out here as I've got a lot on my plate at the moment, but I'll try to find/fix whatever bugs I can.
Finally, I've emailed some contacts inside atheros to see if (a) they can help me debug the issue further, and (b) how this problem was solved in ath9k.
I hope that helps.
Adrian