Atheros 9280 issue

[Sam Leffler]

Alex Dupre wrote:
> I have a Zotac ION board with an Atheros 9280 in the mini-pci slot. I
> did a few tests in sta and hostap mode with 8.0-BETA4 and all seemed to
> work correctly. Today I switched off my old access point and replaced it
> with this new system and FreeBSD 8.0-RC1, but suddenly I got plenty (one
> every few seconds) of the following error messages:
> 
> ath0: stuck beacon; resetting (bmiss count 4)
> 
> Clients can connect to the AP, but obviously packets are dropped every
> time the card is reset.

How do you know packets are dropped?  Nothing should be lost.

> 
> Is there anything I can do to help debugging the issue?
> 
> 
> dmesg:
> 
> ath0: <Atheros 9280> mem 0xfebf0000-0xfebfffff irq 16 at device 0.0 on pci4
> ath0: [ITHREAD]
> ath0: AR9280 mac 128.2 RF5133 phy 13.0
> 
> 
> pciconf:
> 
> ath0 at pci0:4:0:0:        class=0x028000 card=0x10671a3b chip=0x002a168c
> rev=0x01 hdr=0x00
>     vendor     = 'Atheros Communications Inc.'
>     device     = 'Atheros AR5B91 Wireless Network Adapter (0001)'
>     class      = network
> 

"every few seconds" is not helpful.  Look for something else in the
system that coincides w/ your msgs.  It's possible that periodic
calibration done by the driver has a bad effect; you can turn it off by
setting a sysctl (look at sysctl -a and/or the driver code).

	Sam