hostap with atheros unusable on releng_6?

[Martin]

JoaoBR wrote:
> Hi
> configuring an atheros card for hostap in releng_6 seems to be unusable at all 
> at this time.

RELENG_6 is the whole branch. What date has your kernel been built?

> The card is running fine and can be configured as wished but after some time 
> it stops working

I experience this when using 11g mode with hostap. The maximal
performance I've seen was about 2,5MB/s transfering a file.
But scp mostly gives up transfering large file and the log says
something about wrong MAC address. There are also large delays
sometimes and the average performance is a lot worse than in 11b
mode.

I'm using 11b at the moment and there are no problems. The speed
I get is about 850kB/s. This is enough for my notebook.

> using 11g this problem appears after some minutes or sometimes after booting 
> the machine it do not communicate, in 11b it stays mostly 20-40 minutes 
> working, due to this problems I still had no time to look at 11a

Are you sure you don't have problems with DHCP or something like that,
when using 11b?

> running the whole ifconfig command again after ifconfig ath0 down brings it 
> back up for another similar period

On older kernels I had to do this, too. But now wireless support
seems to be stable.

> changing the ath for a wi prism card using the exactly same configuration 
> everything works fine and stable

You're lucky. My wi(4) never worked properly (around 5.0R) and I gave it
back. I realized that FreeBSD hostap support wasn't stable at that time.

Martin