iwn driver on 7.1

[Jan Henrik Sylvester]

Da Rock wrote:
> On Sun, 2009-01-18 at 14:17 -0600, Brandon Gooch wrote:
>> I have a working driver for the Intel 4965, aka iwn(4), loaded on my
>> Lenovo X300 running FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE (amd64).
>> 
>> This driver is a slightly-modified version of the iwn(4) driver
>> backported from 8.0-CURRENT by Gavin Atkinson:
>> 
>> http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=221758+0+/usr/local/www/db/text/2008/freebsd-stable/20080928.freebsd-stable
>> 
>> I was seeing the same symptoms described in these threads (among others):
>> 
>> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2008-September/045264.html
>> 
>> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=1334322+1338147+/usr/local/www/db/text/2009/freebsd-questions/20090118.freebsd-questions
>> 
>> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=1418632+1421765+/usr/local/www/db/text/2009/freebsd-questions/20090118.freebsd-questions
>> 
>> ...so I debugged and modified Gavin's driver for my system.
>> 
>> The driver and the source tree diff can be downloaded here for any
>> brave souls wanting to test it out:
>> 
>> http://sites.google.com/site/bsdgooch/files
>> 
>> I'm using the driver now to send this e-mail over a link to my TP-LINK
>> TL-WR941ND access point (with WPA2). Feedback and bug reports would be
>> useful.
>> 
>> -brandon
> 
> Sounds like you got to it before I did- thank god! :)
> 
> Question though: have you got it figured for a channels yet?
> 
> I'll test it for you and keep you updated with my results.

Thanks for working on the driver!

The only difference to the version of gavin that I could see is that the 
bands in iwn_bands that got commented out were brought back. Or did I 
miss something? Do you know why they were commented out and it was 
unnecessary? Or was it just to fix the crash?

I did a few test runs: It does not crash immediately as the version from 
gavin, but the error I had with the perforce version
   iwn0: error, INTR=82000000<SW_ERROR,RX_INTR> STATUS=0x10000
   iwn0: iwn_config: could not set power mode, error 35
is there -- in 3 out of 3 tries. So nothing improved there. (I hit that 
error on first use in about 50% of the cases before.)

Moreover, at 3 out of 4 tries to 'kldunload if_iwn' after hitting the 
error (after '/etc/rc.d/netif stop iwn0' and 'ifconfig iwn0 down'), 
there was a crash: 2 page faults and 1 freeze. I have not had that with 
the perforce version. (Maybe once long ago, but I think I forgot to stop 
iwn0 at that time.)

The one time I actually got the (WPA2) connection up, I was able to 
transfer with a similar speed as with the perforce version.

Thus, for me, there are no improvement over the (old) perforce version. 
Probably by chance, but I had more crashes.

I think the thread on stable@ should rather be continued than the one on 
questions@, but since Da Rock answered on questions@, I reinclude both.

Cheers,
Jan Henrik