Re: WaveLAN problems (wicontrol: SIOCGWAVELAN: Invalid argument)

On Thu, Feb 20, 2003 at 08:36:35AM +0100, Michael Bretterklieber wrote:
> I have a Netgear MA401 PCCard. The system recognizes the card, but after
> typeing ...
> bash-2.05a# wicontrol
[...]
> Comms quality/signal/noise:             [ 0 0 0 ]
> wicontrol: SIOCGWAVELAN: Invalid argument

I'm seeing the same behavior with an internal WaveLAN MiniPCI card in
a Vaio VX89, running -CURRENT from Feb 9. I noticed the same behavior
on prior versions of -CURRENT, but RELENG_5_0 works just fine. The
RIDs that cause the above error are:
  WI_RID_DBM_COMMS_QUAL
  WI_RID_PRI_IDENTITY
  WI_RID_STA_IDENTITY
  WI_RID_CARD_ID
  WI_RID_REG_DOMAINS
All of these are present and work in RELENG_5_0; in fact, I see no
problems at all in RELENG_5_0 (well, none related to the wifi).

Now for the bizarre part: when poking around in -CURRENT today to
get the above list, I ran 'dhclient fxp0' to try to recall the diffs
I'd made to get wicontrol to work (namely, commenting out the above
RIDs).  I promptly got a series of the following messages:

wi0: timeout in wi_cmd 0x0002; event status 0x0080
wi0: timeout in wi_cmd 0x0000; event status 0x0080
wi0: wi_cmd: busy bit won't clear.
wi0: wi_cmd: busy bit won't clear.
[...]
wi0: wi_cmd: busy bit won't clear.
wi0: init failed
wi0: wi_cmd: busy bit won't clear.
wi0: wi_cmd: busy bit won't clear.
[...]
wi0: wi_cmd: busy bit won't clear.
wi0: failed to allocate 2372 bytes on NIC
wi0: tx buffer allocation failed (error 12)
wi0: interface not running

During this time, the console was completely unresponsive, including
the key lock lights; even the 'Wireless' light on the front was
unresponsive to the wireless switch on the side. After a while
(didn't time it, sorry), the console came back to life, and syslog
reported

dhclient: send_packet: network is down

This message repeated a few times; wicontrol gave an 'Operation
timed out' message before printing anything, and ifconfig took a
long time to run and gave output interspersed with 'busy bit won't
clear' messages. However, and this is the strange (to me) part,
once I killed dhclient, ifconfig worked, wicontrol worked (including
the RIDs mentioned above), and I no longer saw the busy bit messages.
The card seemed to respond to commands; I could assign it an IP,
although I couldn't check if it acually worked because I don't have
wireless here. I'll test that later today, when I'm near an AP;
I'll also file a PR once I get a more recent -CURRENT built.

Then it's on to probing into the wonders of ACPI.

Relevant bits of dmesg from -CURRENT, with verbose boot:

wi0: <WaveLAN/IEEE> at port 0x100-0x13f irq 9 function 0 config 1 on pccard1
pcib1: device wi0 requested decoded I/O range 0x100-0x13f
pcib1: device pccard1 requested decoded I/O range 0x100-0x13f
pcib1: device wi0 requested decoded I/O range 0x100-0x13f
wi0: 802.11 address: 00:02:2d:59:6f:98
wi0: using Lucent Embedded WaveLAN/IEEE
wi0: Lucent Firmware: Station (6.16.1)
wi0: supported rates: 1Mbps 2Mbps 5.5Mbps 11Mbps
wi0: bpf attached
wi0: bpf attached

Hopefully that'll be enough detail to allow someone who knows a bit
more about this than myself to understand the problem a bit more.


-- 
Geoff

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