Recommended wireless card (or is there a chance to get either iwi or ath fixed)?

[Kevin Oberman]

> Date: Mon, 23 Feb 2009 16:21:17 +0100
> From: Christian Walther <cptsalek at gmail.com>
> Sender: owner-freebsd-stable at freebsd.org
> 
> Hi,
> 
> after some time without FreeBSD I installed 7.1 on an IBM Thinkpad T30
> (with ZFS root on encrypted geli, works great).
> Config is:
> 
> FreeBSD hasking.alashan.nongo 7.1-STABLE FreeBSD 7.1-STABLE #3: Thu
> Feb  5 21:10:45 CET 2009
> root at hasking.alashan.nongo:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/HASKING  i386
> 
> I tried using my ath based D-Link DWL G650, which still seems to have
> some issues in regard to interrupt handling:
> 
> Feb 17 20:15:21 hasking kernel: ath0: <Atheros 5212> mem
> 0xd0210000-0xd021ffff irq 3 at device 0.0 on cardbus0
> Feb 17 20:15:21 hasking kernel: ath0: [ITHREAD]
> Feb 17 20:15:21 hasking kernel: ath0: WARNING: using obsoleted
> if_watchdog interface
> Feb 17 20:15:21 hasking kernel: ath0: Ethernet address: 00:19:5b:3a:82:be
> Feb 17 20:15:21 hasking kernel: ath0: mac 7.9 phy 4.5 radio 5.6
> ...
> Feb 17 21:39:19 hasking kernel: ath0: link state changed to UP
> Feb 17 21:39:19 hasking kernel: ath0: link state changed to DOWN
> Feb 17 21:39:23 hasking kernel: ath0: link state changed to UP
> Feb 17 21:39:23 hasking kernel: ath0: link state changed to DOWN
> Feb 17 21:39:24 hasking kernel: interrupt storm detected on "irq3:";
> throttling interrupt source
> 
> 
> Next I gave the following card a try:
> iwi0: <Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2915ABG> mem 0xd0200000-0xd0200fff irq 5
> at device 2.0 on pci2
> iwi0: Ethernet address: 00:15:00:31:f3:76
> iwi0: [ITHREAD]
> 
> ...and it regularly drops/looses connection to the WLAN router, as
> stated in the following PR:
> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=124767
> 
> Basically, my question is if there is a fix for any of these issues
> that I haven't found so far, so that I can eventually use one of my
> existing wireless cards, or if I should switch to a different
> brand/model. If the latter is the case I'd like to know which one to
> choose.

I'm not sure what the problem you are seeing with the Atheros 5212 might
be, but I use that wireless card in my T43 and it has worked very well
for years.

I'm not sure what is using irq3, but it is normally COMM2, which i
believe only exists on the T30 when the unit is in a docking
station. Could you check on the output of 'vmstat -i' to see what might
be using it? 

Are you running with APIC? I know that it has to be disabled on the T43
and it may need to be on the T30. (It's been a while since I've used the
T30.) Add 'hint.apic.0.disabled=1' to /boot/loader to do this.

Finally, try 'ifconfig ath0 -bgscan'. Several people have reported that
this fixes periodic loss of association on the 5212. By default,
background scanning is done every 5 minutes and makes roaming work much
better, but seems to have some issues on this card.

I'm not at all confident that this will lead to fixing the problem, but
it's easy to check on and may point in the right direction.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman at es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634
Key fingerprint:059B 2DDF 031C 9BA3 14A4  EADA 927D EBB3 987B 3751