Atheros (ath) MSI wireless embedded chipset fails to attach on 7.0-STABLE

[Alexander Sack]

Final update, I got everything working!  I came home and connected by
new notebook using the latest PCIe Atheros chipset to a WPA2 network
using wpa_supplicant!  Yippie!

Hope this thread helps someone else,

-aps

On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 5:17 PM, Alexander Sack <pisymbol at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 3:44 PM, Alexander Sack <pisymbol at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 3:35 PM, Edwin L. Culp <eculp at casasponti.net> wrote:
>>> "Manolis Kiagias" <sonic2000gr at gmail.com> escribió:
>>>
>>>> Edwin L. Culp wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> "Alexander Sack" <pisymbol at gmail.com> escribió:
>>>>>
>>>>>> On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 11:31 AM, Manolis Kiagias
>>>>>> <sonic2000gr at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Alexander Sack wrote:
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Hello:
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> I have installed FreeBSD-7.0-amd64 stable on my new AMD X2 Turon based
>>>>>>>> notebook, a MSI-1710A (GX710Ax) which has a generic embedded
>>>>>>>> controller.  During boot up I notice that ATH complains with:
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> ath_rate: version 1.2 <SampleRate bit-rate selection algorithm>
>>>>>>>> ath_hal: 0.9.20.3 (AR5210, AR5211, AR5212, RF5111, RF5112, RF2413,
>>>>>>>> RF5413)
>>>>>>>> ath0: <Atheros 5424/2424> mem 0xfd7f0000-0xfd7fffff irq 16 at device
>>>>>>>> 0.0
>>>>>>>> on pci2
>>>>>>>> ath0: Reserved 0x10000 bytes for rid 0x10 type 3 at 0xfd7f0000
>>>>>>>> ath0: [MPSAFE]
>>>>>>>> ath0: [ITHREAD]
>>>>>>>> ath0: unable to attach hardware; HAL status 13
>>>>>>>> device_attach: ath0 attach returned 6
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> HAL status 13 from the header file seems to indicate that the
>>>>>>>> 7.0-STABLE driver doesn't support my hardware revision.  Here is my
>>>>>>>> pciconf -l output:
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Maybe you could try compiling a kernel with a newer hal. This is the
>>>>>>> kind of
>>>>>>> hack we use on the eeepc. Have a look at this:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> http://nighthack.org/wiki/EeeBSD
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Thank you SO much for this link.  That's EXACTLY what I want to do
>>>>>> because I realize that this is a HAL problem.  I've been searching
>>>>>> like MAD where I could get an updated binary HAL for this chipset
>>>>>> (PCIe based).
>>>>>
>>>>> That makes two of us ;)
>>>>>
>>>>> My dmesg is very, very similar to yours and hoped that this would work.
>>>>>
>>>>> ath0: <Atheros 5424/2424> mem 0xf2200000-0xf220ffff irq 19 at device 0.0
>>>>> on pci5
>>>>> ath0: Reserved 0x10000 bytes for rid 0x10 type 3 at 0xf2200000
>>>>> ioapic0: routing intpin 19 (PCI IRQ 19) to vector 64
>>>>> ath0: [MPSAFE]
>>>>> ath0: [ITHREAD]
>>>>> ath0: unable to attach hardware; HAL status 13
>>>>> device_attach: ath0 attach returned 6
>>>>>
>>>>> I followed the instructions from the web page, recompiled and it made no
>>>>> difference which really worries me that I must have done something wrong.
>>>>>
>>>>> cd madwifi-ng-r2756+ar5007/hal
>>>>> cp -R * /usr/src/sys/contrib/dev/ath/
>>>>>
>>>>> I did not erase it previously but  am going to try that.  I made no kern
>>>>> configuration changes to find that the hal is from contrib.  Is there
>>>>> nothing else I should do?
>>>>>
>>>>> Thanks,
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Well, I have only tested this on the eeepc and can confirm it works.
>>>> Maybe different atheros chipset have other problems not directly related
>>>> to the hal version.
>>>> You do not need to do anything more that what is shown in the page: untar,
>>>> replace the existing files, recompile / install kernel, reboot. If you got
>>>> no errors during the kernel compilation phase, you can safely assume you did
>>>> everything correctly, and the problem lies elsewhere.
>>>
>>> At least there was a ray of hope for the time it took to compile the kernel.
>>
>> Ed:
>>
>> I took recompiled and got the same issue.  If I use the LATEST mad
>> distro I get some compile bugs (ath_desc_status was moved into
>> ath_desc structure in ah_desc.h) which I can't completely work around
>> (apparently the API into the HAL has changed as well).  What I'm
>> trying to do is look at the Linux driver and understand the newer API
>> in order to get past this compile issue and see if this works.
>> Otherwise I believe we are SOL.
>>
>> Does anyone know if the CURRENT contains an updated ath HAL AND driver
>> for support of newer PCIe based chipsets?
>>
>> If I get it to work I will let you know...
>>
>
> Ok the trick is not to get it from the madfi project.  Get it from the
> author directly!
>
> If you grab:
>
> http://people.freebsd.org/~sam/ath_hal-20080528.tgz
>
> Copy the contents into the src/sys/contrib/dev/ath/* and recompile,
> you should now see ath attach properly to the your NIC card.  Thanks
> go to my friend jkim for pointing this out since he has a similar
> notebook/chipset and runs CURRENT successfully.  I tried using CURRENT
> ath but there is to much vap support in it and it turned out the
> 7.0-RELEASE driver works.
>
> Now ath attaches properly and I'm going to test it out!  (this is at
> least much further than a bad attach status code from the HAL).
>
> Let me know how it goes,
>
> -aps
>