System freeze with Atheros 2417 WiFi PCIe card?

[Rui Paulo]

On 28 May 2010, at 11:23, Lassi Tuura wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I have a system on which I've installed FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE, then later
> 8.0-STABLE 201004 (amd64).
> 
> Under heavy disk load the system freezes totally: screen goes blank and it
> loses all connection outside world - network, keyboard, etc. won't work.
> Sometimes the screen gets filled with stripes instead. Only hard reboot
> pressing and holding the power button revives the system.
> 
> The only way I have found to reproduce the problem is heavy disk load,
> e.g. running something very seek rich, e.g. iozone or competing dd
> processes. Since the computer goes completely 'black' when this happens,
> there is nothing in logs for the preceding 30 seconds, and no messages on
> any console. I searched various freebsd list and bug database archives,
> and didn't find anything similar enough.
> 
> After taking parts out and swapping parts with another computer, I am left
> with strong evidence the problem is caused or at least triggered by PCIe
> wifi card, TP-LINK TL-WN350GD. Removing the card makes the system stable,
> whereas removing or swapping any other parts seems to make no difference
> at all.
> 
> The WiFi itself works otherwise fine as far as I can tell. The motherboard
> is ASUS M4A78L-M LE, otherwise there's 4GB ECC RAM, AMD Athlon II X2 235e
> CPU, and 4 * 1 TB HDDs.
> 
> The card is identified in dmesg as:
> 
> ath0: <Atheros 2417> mem 0xfebf0000-0xfebfffff irq 21 at device 7.0 on pci3
> ath0: [ITHREAD]
> ath0: AR2417 mac 15.0 RF5424 phy 7.0
> 
> The motherboard LAN is identified as:
> 
> alc0: <Atheros AR8131 PCIe Gigabit Ethernet> port 0xec00-0xec7f mem
> 0xfeac0000-0xfeafffff irq 18 at device 0.0 on pci2
> alc0: 15872 Tx FIFO, 15360 Rx FIFO
> alc0: Using 1 MSI message(s).
> alc0: 4GB boundary crossed, switching to 32bit DMA addressing mode.
> miibus0: <MII bus> on alc0
> atphy0: <Atheros F1 10/100/1000 PHY> PHY 0 on miibus0
> atphy0:  10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, 1000baseT-FDX, auto
> alc0: Ethernet address: 90:e6:ba:6d:e8:fb
> alc0: [FILTER]
> 
> Any idea what would cause this? Are there known problems with ath driver?
> Is this some sort of hardware conflict? What can I do to isolate, debug
> and/or fix the problem? Or should I just get another wifi card? If so, any
> recommended chipsets?

This can also be caused by broken hardware or by broken motherboard chipsets. There's no easy way to find the source of the problem without hardware engineering tools. Just replace the card with another one and try again.

Regards,
--
Rui Paulo