iwn firmware instability with an up-to-date stable kernel

[Bernhard Schmidt]

On Sat, Apr 24, 2010 at 06:24:42PM -0700, Garrett Cooper wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 24, 2010 at 12:50 AM, Bernhard Schmidt
> <bschmidt at techwires.net> wrote:
> > On Sat, Apr 24, 2010 at 12:45:14AM -0700, Garrett Cooper wrote:
> >> On Sat, Apr 24, 2010 at 12:34 AM, Bernhard Schmidt
> >> <bschmidt at techwires.net> wrote:
> >> >
> >> > How did you do that? Reloading the module, or with ifconfig?
> >>
> >> /etc/rc.d/netif restart , which does the ifconfig operations (no
> >> module change occurred AFAIK, but wlan0 did of course do some
> >> device_printf's when it was associating itself with iwn(4)).
> >
> > Can you do ps xa | grep wpa? Just wondering if wpa_supplicant gets
> > started twice.
> 
> Some more interesting data.
> 
> Open authentication at home works out of the box via wpa_supplicant
> with ifconfig_wlan0="WPA DHCP" whereas it flaked out and died at work.
> 
> There are two instances of wpa_supplicant started up on the laptop.
> Here's a snippet from pstree that shows that both processes are
> standalone:
> 
> -+= 00001 root /sbin/init --
>  |--= 00121 root adjkerntz -i
>  |--= 00559 root /sbin/devd
>  |--= 00711 root /usr/sbin/syslogd -s
>  |--= 00735 root /usr/sbin/rpcbind
>  |--= 00879 root /usr/sbin/moused -p /dev/psm0 -t auto
>  |--= 00903 messagebus /usr/local/bin/dbus-daemon --system
>  |--= 01073 root /usr/sbin/sshd
>  |--= 01081 root sendmail: accepting connections (sendmail)
>  |--= 01085 smmsp sendmail: Queue runner at 00:30:00 for
> /var/spool/clientmqueue (sendmail)
>  |--= 01093 root /usr/sbin/cron -s
>  |-+= 01176 haldaemon /usr/local/sbin/hald
>  | \-+- 01180 root hald-runner
>  |   |--- 01185 root hald-addon-mouse-sysmouse: /dev/psm0 (hald-addon-mouse-sy)
>  |   \--- 01205 root hald-addon-storage: /dev/acd0 (hald-addon-storage)
>  |--= 01179 root /usr/local/sbin/console-kit-daemon
>  |--= 01727 root /usr/sbin/wpa_supplicant -s -B -i wlan0 -c
> /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -D bsd -P /var/run/wpa_supplicant/wlan0.pid
>  |--= 01783 root /usr/sbin/wpa_supplicant -s -B -i wlan0 -c
> /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -D bsd -P /var/run/wpa_supplicant/wlan0.pid
>  |--= 01866 root dhclient: wlan0 [priv] (dhclient)
>  |--= 01902 _dhcp dhclient: wlan0 (dhclient)

Indeed, devd is responsible for that, removing
notify 0 {
	match "system"		"IFNET";
	match "type"		"ATTACH";
	action "/etc/pccard_ether $subsystem start";
};
from devd.conf prevents a seconds call to rc.d/netif and therefore
rc.d/wpa_supplicant. This breaks the intended purpose though.

Can we somehow prevent this by checking the pidfile in
rc.d/wpa_supplicant?

-- 
Bernhard