Re: Atheros AR5008X AR5416 issues

Warren Block wrote:
> This Atheros mini-PCIe card is in a Toshiba Satellite A215-S6820.
> Windows identifies it as an "Atheros AR5008X".  It's a b/g/n card with
> three antenna connections.  FreeBSD really hates the ACPI on this
> system, and insists on it being disabled.  I don't think that's the
> problem with the wireless card.
> 
> ath0: <Atheros 5416> mem 0xf8200000-0xf820ffff irq 19 at device 0.0 on
> pci20
> ath0: [ITHREAD]
> ath0: AR5418 mac 12.10 RF5133 phy 8.1
> 
> It sort-of works with a Linkys WRT54G b/g access point, but has some
> problems that keep it from working well.
> 
> Transfers are usually stalled, then will suddenly jump to 2MB/sec for a
> little while, then stall again with the output of bb hang messages.
> Access point LED shows long pauses.
> 
> kernel: ath0: bb hang detected (0x80), reseting
> kernel: ath0: bb hang detected (0x80), reseting
> kernel: ath0: bb hang detected (0x4), reseting
> kernel: ath0: bb hang detected (0x4), reseting

This problem is a hardware bug in the 5416 that also appears in other
Atheros 11n cards (i've seen it w/ 9160- and 9280-based cards).  Atheros
refused to help me resolve this, except to say the problem doesn't
hobble their linux driver. So to fix this problem you'll need to compare
how the linux code works to how the freebsd code works.  If you can
collect register access traces from the linux driver then you can
compare them to what happens in freebsd (use the ATH_DEBUG_ALQ option).
 Otherwise you can try to do this through code inspection.

	Sam