if_wpi crashes when renewing in FreeBSD 8 all versions

[Bernhard Schmidt]

On Tuesday 23 November 2010 22:03:22 Zhihao Yuan wrote:
> My laptop is a HP Compaq nc8430, and the wireless card is Intel 3945ABG,
> with if_wpi driver.
> wpi0: flags=8802<BROADCAST,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 2290
> ether 00:1b:77:31:1d:74         media: IEEE 802.11 Wireless Ethernet
> autoselect (autoselect)         status: no carrier
> 
> I can use the wireless correctly when I start the system. But after some
> time (depends on your wireless router renewing settings), it can not renew
> the DHCP settings. And, if you try to renew it with sudo /etc/rc.d/netif
> restart for like more than 2 times, the whole system will crash.
> 
> The interesting thing is, the renewing problem only occurs on the wireless
> network with a WPA2 protocol. For the WEP or None-keys network, there is no
> problem. For the WPA-EAP network, you can redo the DHCP but not
> /etc/rc.d/netif restart.

That is a known issue, there is race in our devd/rc-subsystems and especially 
the way wpa_supplicant get exclusive access to the interface. This leads to 
all kind of funny results, panics being one of it.

I have patches to address the panics but this does not fix the initial issue 
which is that wpa_supplicant gets started twice.

-- 
Bernhard