ndis and USB wirelless ethernet

[Nikos Vassiliadis]

Weongyo Jeong wrote:
> I'm happy to see your device is successfully associated with AP.
> However it seems it's a bad news that you sometimes meet crashes.  Does
> a random crash mean a OS hang (e.g. could not type any keys) or no more
> work of network operations?

It hangs, I cannot use the keyboard and I have to power-cycle it.
It can happen after some time downloading and uploading. It hangs
after 5 to 30 minutes of heavy traffic. By heavy traffic, I mean
the maximum I can get from this device, which is 50KBytes/sec.

I am not sure what will happen if I let it idle for, let's say
one day, but I haven't had a single crash during times with
low activity, such as ssh traffic.

> Frankly speaking, for both cases it looks I could not provide any
> solutions without backtraces unless I encountered same problems on my
> environment.  It'd better if we can reproduce its problem easily.

Unfortunately, I have no solid facts to show you. The only strange
thing I've seen and is consistent, is this:

speed# vmstat -m | grep USBdev ; sleep 1 ; vmstat -m | grep USBdev ; 
sleep 1 ; vmstat -m | grep USBdev
        USBdev    53     4K       -   267579  16,32,128,1024
        USBdev    53     4K       -   267612  16,32,128,1024
        USBdev    53     4K       -   267642  16,32,128,1024
speed#
speed# vmstat -m | grep USBdev ; sleep 1 ; vmstat -m | grep USBdev ; 
sleep 1 ; vmstat -m | grep USBdev
        USBdev    53     4K       -   268071  16,32,128,1024
        USBdev    53     4K       -   268101  16,32,128,1024
        USBdev    53     4K       -   268140  16,32,128,1024

And then with some traffic:
speed# ping -i 0.01 192.168.1.1 > /dev/null &
[1] 1777
speed# vmstat -m | grep USBdev ; sleep 1 ; vmstat -m | grep USBdev ; 
sleep 1 ; vmstat -m | grep USBdev
        USBdev    53     4K       -   270249  16,32,128,1024
        USBdev    58     4K       -   271095  16,32,128,1024
        USBdev    56     4K       -   272008  16,32,128,1024
speed# vmstat -m | grep USBdev ; sleep 1 ; vmstat -m | grep USBdev ; 
sleep 1 ; vmstat -m | grep USBdev
        USBdev    54     4K       -   279649  16,32,128,1024
        USBdev    57     4K       -   280544  16,32,128,1024
        USBdev    54     4K       -   281423  16,32,128,1024

I don't know how relevant is the above, but it seemed strange,
so I am posting it...

> One thing to hang as far as I know is that try to execute `ifconfig down
> && ifconfig up' multiple times.  In NDIS USB support it's recommended
> that `ifconfig up' is executed once.

OK, noted and avoided.

> I think you can try another drivers.

Will do.

> AFAIK this behavior (ASSOC -> RUN) depends on the routine of the link
> status change on NDIS driver that in private experience, some drivers
> doesn't call the link status handler even if it's ready to use or call
> the handler too early which is one of the abnormal.
> 
> So don't know what's going on in NDIS driver currently.

I see.

Thanks again Weongyo for your help, I'll report again
when I'll find some more useful bits about the problem.

Regards, Nikos