Re: ath, wpa_supplicant and ioctl(SIOCS80211)

[Stephen Borrill <netbsd%precedence.co.uk@localhost>]

On Fri, 25 Sep 2009, Stephen Borrill wrote:
> I'm having a problem on some machines with ath(4) (5.0_STABLE). The symptoms 
> are that the interface connects to the network well enough to get an IP 
> address, but then communication ceases even though wpa_supplicant claims it 
> is connected. If I stop wpa_supplicant and restart it will not reconnnect. At 
> another site, it generally seems to work, but if wpa_supplicant needs to 
> re-associate (e.g. moving between access points), it will not reconnect until 
> the machine is rebooted.
[snip]
> The device is:
> ath0 at pci2 dev 0 function 0
> ath0: interrupting at ioapic1 pin 0
> ath0: 11b rates: 1Mbps 2Mbps 5.5Mbps 11Mbps
> ath0: 11g rates: 1Mbps 2Mbps 5.5Mbps 11Mbps 6Mbps 9Mbps 12Mbps 18Mbps 24Mbps 
> 36Mbps 48Mbps 54Mbps
> ath0: mac 14.2 phy 7.0 radio 10.2
> Skipping broken PCI header on 2:0:0
>
> I noticed that on my (working) machine, because of power management the 
> output of "pcictl pci2 list" alters as I ifconfig up and down the interface. 
> ifconfig ath0 down makes it return nothing. ifconfig ath0 up gives: 002:00:0: 
> Atheros Communications product 0x001c (ethernet network, revision 0x01)

For laughs, I commented out the power handler lines in if_ath_pci.c:
        if (!pmf_device_register(self, ath_pci_suspend, ath_pci_resume))
                aprint_error_dev(self, "couldn't establish power handler\n");
        else {
                pmf_class_network_register(self, &sc->sc_if);
                pmf_device_suspend_self(self);
        }

On my machine, this stopped the device disappearing in pcictl output (and 
also removed the "Skipping broken PCI header on 2:0:0" line - perhaps 
normally the device is being powered down too aggressively).

On the test machine, nothing is listed in "pcictl pci2 list". It is as 
though the device is present throughout autoconf, but then disappears. 
There is nothing in dmesg regarding this.

--
Stephen