Wifi Card for laptop

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On Fri, 21 Nov 2008 01:43:29 +0100, Albert Shih <Albert.Shih at obspm.fr> wrote:
> First thanks you for you help
> In fact I make the wifi run by using wpi driver.

That's nice, yes.  The wpi(4) driver seems to support the chipset of
your wlan adapter :)

> 	Running wihtout problem:
>
> 		touchpad
> 		X11 (using nv drivers but not the «official» because I'm
> 		running amd64 version).
>
> 	running but with some problem :
>
> 		wifi card : chipset 3945
> 		drivers : wpi (compiling in kernel)
> 		problem : sometime the wifi go down (the AP is at < 1m) and
> 		when I try to make that up again he don't work. If I try
> 		the keyboard touch (Fn+F2) that's can crash (reboot) the
> 		computer

Hmmm, that's a bit bad.  Is `Fn+F2' the key that turns wireless OFF/ON
for this laptop?  Maybe the driver is crashing because the device
detaches and re-attaches while the driver is stuck somewhere :(

If you think you can grab a kernel dump from this, maybe it's going to
be useful to debug the problem.

> 	No driver (and of course not working)
>
> 		NetXtreme BCM5756ME Gigabit Ethernet PCIe

I don't see `BCM5756' or `5756' anywhere in the manpages or the source
of the kernel in of 8.0-CURRENT either.  I think this is not supported :(

> I'm running
>
> 	FreeBSD 7.1-PRERELEASE
>
> make after csup (with tag=RELENG_7) and make buildworld;kernel.
>
> I can make «any» test you want. Just ask me.

> usable memory = 4278091776 (4079 MB)
> avail memory  = 4124418048 (3933 MB)

Heh, nice.  I see you are running an amd64 build of FreeBSD, and there
are *lots* of memory on this laptop :)

One of the tests you can run, to find out what is broken in wpi(4), is
to build a kernel with DDB/KDB support, and grab a kernel dump when the
wpi(4) interface stops working.

The ``Developer's Handbook'' can help you build a debugging kernel:

  http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/developers-handbook/kerneldebug.html

Using DDB to trace through the `live' kernel while it is stuck is a bit
tricky, but if you manage to grab some of the DDB output (i.e. with a
serial console or even just a photograph with a camera), then we can
mail the developers of wpi(4) and ask them for more help :)