wpi crashes the system when reconfiguring the network

[lichray]

My system is HP nc8430.

My wireless card (Intel 1395ABG) works not so good. Whenever you do /etc/rc.d/netif restart the whole wireless part dead - wlan0 shows "no carrier", wpi0 reports "no link ..." when doing dhclient wlan0

What the worst part is, if you try to reconfigure the wireless network more than 3 times, system crashes.

I turned on a feature, which will switch wireless card's on/off when you plug in the Ethernet card's cable. This features works fine, but as I said above, whenever you turned wireless network off, you have to reboot to get it to work again.

But don't think "just do not turn it off". Actually, whenever the network is being reconfigured, the problem shows up. Like the dhclient renewing address or something, will also force me to reboot...

So any idea is welcome. Thank you.

 

[lichray]

This problem has been perfectly solved.

1. wpifw must be loaded or compiled into the kernel. if_wpi does not load wpifw automatically. This solves the crash problem.
2. Do not use # /etc/rc.d/netif restart to renew the wireless network. It will create 2 instances of wpa_supplicant, which race for 1 device; Use # ifconfig wlan0 destroy && ifconfig wlan0 create wlandev $device instead.
3. The wpi_newstate is tricky, which makes the driver can not perform a good rescan. This problem has been solved by Bernhard Schmidt in the latest RELENG_8. Thanks him.