Date: Tue, 5 May 2009 10:09:08 -0700 (PDT) From: Luke Dean <LukeD@pobox.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: ath_hal problem on slow hardware, can be tuned? Message-ID: <alpine.BSF.2.00.0905051006560.52172@border.lukas.is-a-geek.org>
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I'm following 7-STABLE with my laptop. As soon as ath_hal appeared, I
started having trouble with my wireless connection dropping every few
hours.
+ath0: ath_chan_set: unable to reset channel 11 (2462 Mhz, flags 0x480 hal
flags 0xc0), hal status 3
The ath manpage documents this error as:
ath%d: ath_chan_set: unable to reset channel %u (%u Mhz) The Atheros
Hardware Access Layer was unable to reset the hardware when switching
channels during scanning. This should not happen.
sys/contrib/dev/ath/ah.h documents the error 3 as:
HAL_EIO = 3, /* Hardware didn't respond as expected */
I can run
/etc/rc.d/netif start
dhclient ath0
to reset the interface and reconnect to the wireless network after
this happens.
I'm thinking that ath_hal doesn't like my card as much as the old
ath driver system did, or perhaps there's some tunable that I need to
adjust.
This is an old laptop. It's a Sony Vaio PCG-Z505S - a celeron
133MHz "designed for MS Windows 98". In the best of circumstances, it
can never establish a wireless connection before ntp comes up at boot
time. wpa_supplicant always "gives up" the first time it attempts to
connect because this hardware is so slow. I'm saying it's slow. I wonder
if it's so slow that it's not responding as fast as ath_hal wants it to
respond whenever it decides to rescan for channels. I know that such
problems can sometimes be solved with sysctls or adjustment of constants.
Would anyone have any suggestions?
The wireless card is a DWL-G650 pccard, revision B2
pciconf -vlbc says this about it:
ath0@pci0:2:0:0: class=0x020000 card=0x32021186 chip=0x0013168c
rev=0x01 hdr=0x00
vendor = 'Atheros Communications Inc.'
device = 'AR5212, AR5213 802.11a/b/g Wireless Adapter'
class = network
subclass = ethernet
bar [10] = type Memory, range 32, base 0x88000000, size 65536,
enabled
cap 01[44] = powerspec 2 supports D0 D3 current D0
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