Atheros Wireless Card Causes Page Fault

[Edward Ruggeri]

Hi,

This is a question about a hardware problem.  I hope this is an
appropriate place to ask.

I have a recently purchased Lenovo ThinkPad, with a Atheros 5212
wireless card (well, dmesg says it's an Atheros 5212; I believe it).
It also has a wired internet connector, which works perfectly fine.  I
wish I was writing you from that computer, but I am at work right now
and don't have the ThinkPad at my fingertips.  I can update later
tonight, but perhaps you can spot my error with just the somewhat
incomplete information I have right now.

I have compiled the Atheros driver and wireless support into my kernel:
"device ath
device ath_hal
device ath_rate_sample
device wlan
device wlan_wep
device wlan_ccmp
device wlan_tkip"

The card is detected correctly upon system startup.

If I write ifconfig_ath0="DHCP" into /etc/rc.conf (or, alternatively,
use dhclient ath0) the system connects to the wireless router and gets
an IP address successfully.  (My wireless at home is unsecured).

I go to test the connection in Lynx.  Google loads (yay!).  I submit a
google search, that may load.  But I rarely get a third page
transmitted before I get a page fault.  The error is quite like this
person's (http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2006-September/065608.html),
though his problem didn't seem to be resolved on the list.

In particular, the system reports a "fatal trap 12: page fault while
in kernel mode".  Fault virtual address is 0x0, not 0xc, if it makes a
difference.  The fault code is also "supervisor read, page not
present."  The current process is ath0 taskq.

To my (totally uneducated) eyes, this seems to be a driver problem.  I
am not certain of my wireless card's make/number, but I assume that it
really is an Atheros 5212, not only because that's what FreeBSD says,
but that's also what Lenovo ships as the basic ThinkPad card (I didn't
go with Intel wireless).  So if I'm using the right driver, I'm not
sure what the issue might be.

Thanks for any help you might have!

Sincerely,

-- Ned Ruggeri