wpi0 going offline frequently

["Steven M. Bellovin" <smb%cs.columbia.edu@localhost>]

On a Thinkpad T61 running amd64-current (right now, 4.99.53, but this
has been going on for a while), wpi0 will frequently go offline after a

        wpi0: fatal firmware error

message.   This almost always happens when I start X, perhaps because
of interrupts being masked.  It happened just now in this sequence:

Feb 18 01:16:41 yellowstone /netbsd: pckbport: command timeout
Feb 18 01:16:41 yellowstone /netbsd: wpi0: fatal firmware error
Feb 18 01:16:41 yellowstone /netbsd: pms_disable: command error

The machine froze for ~30 seconds -- I thought it had crashed -- but
came back, except for wpi0.

The most annoying time this happens, though, is when I'm on a public
net.  I don't know if it's the presence of multiple access points, too
much traffic, or what.  This, I should add, is on nets without WEP or
WPA.

Whenever this happens, ifconfig shows the RUNNING bit off for wpi0.  A
simple 'ifconfig wpi0 up' solves it.  (I'd put that into an ifwatchd
script, except that it isn't receiving interface-Down events for this;
see another post on that problem.)

I have a few questions...

First -- is anyone else seeing this?

Second -- is this a firmware bug or a driver bug?  (I have the latest
firmware package.)

Third -- is it possible for the driver to recover and automatically
reload/restart the firmware?

                --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb