Some time ago I blogged about madwifi and my Netgear WG311T. Well, it still sucks.
I’ve setup a serial console to my PowerPC box now and have now some debugging output, when the madwifi driver horribly fails:
wifi0: rx FIFO overrun; resetting
wifi0: ath_reset: unable to reset hardware: ‘Hardware didn’t respond as expected’ (HAL status 3)
wifi0: ath_chan_set: unable to reset channel 6 (2437 MHz) flags 0xc0 ‘Hardware didn’t respond as expected’ (HAL status 3)
wifi0: ath_chan_set: unable to reset channel 7 (2442 MHz) flags 0xc0 ‘Hardware didn’t respond as expected’ (HAL status 3)
wifi0: ath_chan_set: unable to reset channel 2 (2417 MHz) flags 0xc0 ‘Hardware didn’t respond as expected’ (HAL status 3)
wifi0: ath_chan_set: unable to reset channel 4 (2427 MHz) flags 0xc0 ‘Hardware didn’t respond as expected’ (HAL status 3)
wifi0: ath_chan_set: unable to reset channel 8 (2447 MHz) flags 0xc0 ‘Hardware didn’t respond as expected’ (HAL status 3)
wifi0: ath_chan_set: unable to reset channel 10 (2457 MHz) flags 0xc0 ‘Hardware didn’t respond as expected’ (HAL status 3)
wifi0: ath_chan_set: unable to reset channel 6 (2437 MHz) flags 0xc0 ‘Hardware didn’t respond as expected’ (HAL status 3)
The issue is quite easy to trigger. Just setup a wireless connection, generate some load/traffic and wait some minutes. It’s really a matter of minutes and not hours. In my latest tests I just did a ping -f to another host, another ping -s 16384 to a second host, a scp -r from a thrid host and generate some disk activity by dd’ing hda to /dev/null. The machine crashed within two minutes.
Maybe it is related to some interrupt problems, but as I don’t have similar problems without the Netgear WG311T, I doubt that my machine is faulty. Even worse the problem is easily reproducible on two different PowerPC machines.
So, dear lazyweb, what wifi card (PCI, a/b/g) is good and flawlessly working under PowerPC linux? Non atheros and madwifi solutions preferred (manufacturer/type/chipset).