Re: Atheros onboard AR9271 can't load firmware most of the time

["Thomas Mueller" <mueller6724%bellsouth.net@localhost>]

On Mon, May 05, 2014 at 09:31:24PM -0700, Thomas Mueller wrote:

> > I see through various device man pages that some firmwares are
> > supposed to be in /etc/firmware, and some are supposed to be in
> > /libdata/firmware.  Why can't they all be in one or the other?
>
> > Firmware was installed to /libdata/firmware, so I made a symbolic
> > link /etc/firmware to /libdata/firmware.

> A bug in the man page - it uses firmware_open() which in turn uses
> sysctl hw.firmware.path. So libdata is correct.

> 35 is EAGAIN - some device or memory resource was not available when trying
> to load the firmware file.

> Martin

I am looking to make hard-drive installations of NetBSD-current amd64 and i386 
on a new Seagate 4 TB hard drive that I bought to replace a Western Digital 
Green 3 TB that went bad.  Now I see there is no need to make symbolic links to 
/libdata/firmware from /etc.

But is there a way to say "just a second" or "just 20 seconds" to the firmware 
loader in case it takes a few extra seconds to find the USB or quasi-USB 
on-motherboard wireless adapter?  Where would I find that in the source code, 
would it be athn or firmware_open()?  Maybe a wait parameter for sysctl?

Both FreeBSD and NetBSD are too impatient when a USB device doesn't keep 
responding every millisecond, so it seems from the many console messages.

Sometimes athn wireless firmware loads, but most of the time it fails.  Maybe 
it just gives up too soon?  But I did once take advantage of a rare success to 
connect via this Atheros AR9271 to run cvs up on NetBSD src and pkgsrc trees 
and svn up on FreeBSD src and ports.

Tom