Re: Latest version of wifi-firmware-iwlwifi-kmod behaving better

On Mon, 4 Aug 2025, S. Ross Gohlke wrote:

> That is what prompted me to finally try building wifi-firmware-iwlwifi-kmod 
> from ports because I noticed it was a newer version.

It's still on 20241017; nothing changed there.  Only __FreeBSD_version
got bumped so the second number for the kmod packages increased.

> In three days of 
> moderate use since then I have not had to manually run "service netif restart 
> wlan0" once; I also haven't had nearly as many tabs open.

So it's likely a usage pattern.


>>> * Occasionally over the last few months, frequently restarting netif 
>>> service freezes the system; I have not used the current installation long 
>>> enough to say if this is resolved
>> 
>> I had 7 of them over the weekend; one was WiFi with my own dev code; the
>> others were drm, usb, ...
>> Given you are runing CURRENT ddb should be enabled; if you have a dump
>> device set in rc.conf you could blindly try to type the following when
>> it happens (write it down somewhere maybe so you have it at hand if you
>> cannot get to emails otherwise):
>>     dump
>> [wait 15 seconds]
>>     reset
>> 
>> You can repeat that a few times;  sometimes it doesn't work right away
>> for me;  chances are if it works that you get a crashdump and you can
>> figure out if what caused the panic.
>> 
> Do you mean when the system freezes? Are you talking about typing those 
> commands in a terminal, or are you saying the system, in such state, might 
> accept those commands as input regardless of the active window (I can't 
> imagine that's what you mean but just checking).
>
> Thanks for the tip, I will try it. In fact, thanks for all the tips and for 
> all your work on this project.

What I am saying is that when your system "freezes", e.g mouse no longer
moves, you can no longer switch to ALT-CTRL-F1 manually, etc. the system
likely paniced.  In that case it will sit in ddb but you cannot see that
as graphics does not switch to VT on panic in a lot of cases.

So blindly feeding commands to ddb (in-kernel debugger) is still possible
in most cases.

/bz

-- 
Bjoern A. Zeeb                                                     r15:7