Subject: Re: introducing ath(4) and the FreeBSD 802.11 layer
To: Christos Zoulas <christos@zoulas.com>
From: Sam Leffler <sam@errno.com>
List: tech-net
Date: 10/16/2003 08:46:02
On Wednesday 15 October 2003 07:41 pm, Christos Zoulas wrote:
> My linksys cardbus card does hardware resets every second. Is anyone else
> seeing this?
The Atheros driver supports 3 different chips; you need to first identify
whether you have a 5210, 5211, or 5212-based card.
I'm guessing you have a 5212. If so there is an issue that is outstanding
with the anti noise immunity ANI) support in the HAL. This manifests itself
by a high PHY error rate. PHY errors for the 5212 are reported through rx
descriptors marked with the PHY error bit and a high load can overrun the rx
descriptor list. When this happens it appears the reset operation can result
in a DMA abort and generate a "fatal hardware" interrupt. The result is a
hardware reset.
You can check all this by looking at the driver statistics. There's an ioctl
to obtain them and if you look in the FreeBSD cvs there's a program in
/usr/src/tools/tools/ath
that you might find useful.
Sam