[Wireless] Can't connect to wlan

[Yousif Hassan]

On Wed, 2008-03-12 at 08:06 +1030, Benjamin Close wrote:
> Alphons "Fonz" van Werven wrote:
> > Mel wrote:
> >
> >>>     Do the recent patches by Andrew make a difference?
> >>>
> >>> http://people.freebsd.org/~thompsa/wpi_head.diff
> >>> http://people.freebsd.org/~thompsa/wpi_releng7.diff
> >

(ccing freebsd-net)

Ben,

I had a go with this patch today on top of 7.0-RELEASE.

The good:
- Switching off the radio and back on finally works - nice work.
- Scanning seems faster (but see caveat below)
- Association is MUCH faster (mind you, I don't use an encrypted AP).
- The "failed to align memory" stuff when the driver loads up - fixed. 
- The fact that it reloaded in the kernel even if I manually kldunloaded
if_wpi.ko - fixed

The slightly wonky:
- As reported by someone else:
  wpi0: timeout resetting Tx ring 1
  wpi0: timeout resetting Tx ring 3
  wpi0: timeout resetting Tx ring 4
appear on startup and occasionally on kldload - however they don't
appear to adversely affect too much

The ugly:
- I can only do an ifconfig wpi0 scan every OTHER time - in between
  successful attempts, I get
  wpi0: fatal firmware error
  wpi0: timeout resetting Tx ring (or: timeout resetting Tx ring 0)
  wpi0: link state changed to DOWN

  This wouldn't be so bad since it works every other time, but the
problem is that every time I do a scan, it sets the link state down,
causing the connection to drop - doesn't seem normal.  Of course then it
comes right back up but the network interruption is not so great.

Hmm - what else?  The whole thing seems - livelier.  I need to run some
throughput benchmarks but traffic to/from the card on my local network
seems faster and more responsive.  Hopefully this isn't the placebo
effect. ;)

Great work to you & rest of team on this patch... it's more than usable
at this point!

--Yousif