Hi!
People who had problems with unsupported Atheros devices (single chip
variants found in recent laptops, macbooks, etc.) should get the
latest code from CVS and test it... I was able to make 11b mode work
on at least two different new-age chipsets:
ath0 at pci2 dev 0 function 0 "Atheros AR5212 (IBM MiniPCI)" rev 0x01: apic 1 int 17 (irq 11)
ath0: ARxxxx 10.3 phy 6.1 rf 10.2, WOR2W, address 00:16:cf:ab:4c:97
ath1 at cardbus0 dev 0 function 0 "Atheros Communications, Inc., AR5001-0000-0000, Wireless LAN Reference Card": irq 10
ath1: AR5413 10.5 phy 6.1 rf 6.3, WOR0W, address 00:12:bf:0e:7d:36
Thanks again to Dave Del Debbio and David Menzel for donating me PCI
Express MiniCards for testing and development.
But there are still some known problems:
- The ath0 device sometimes runs into a hardware-locking RX overrun
bug. The only way to recover the device is to _cold_ start the
computer. Use "ifconfig ath0 debug" and look for "rx FIFO overrun;
resetting".
- The devices sometimes need a long time to calibrate, just associate
and wait some seconds before trying your first ping.
- The offset is not alway right, I'm trying to find a better way to
set the channels correctly. See the attached commit message for more info.
- more...?
Hacked and tested in the Melbourne Museum during the AUUG 2007...
reyk
----- Forwarded message from Reyk Floeter -----
Date: Fri, 12 Oct 2007 09:34:12 -0600 (MDT)
From: Reyk Floeter
To: source-changes@cvs.openbsd.org
Subject: CVS: cvs.openbsd.org: src
X-Loop: source-changes@openbsd.org
Precedence: list
CVSROOT: /cvs
Module name: src
Changes by: reyk@cvs.openbsd.org 2007/10/12 09:34:11
Modified files:
sys/dev/ic : ar5xxx.c ar5xxx.h
Log message:
The newer single chip Atheros wireless chipsets like the AR5424,
AR2423 etc. are mostly compatible to the AR5212 but use a different
algorithm to set the 2GHz RF channel, that's why they didn't work in
OpenBSD. I figured out that the channels were set with an offset,
setting channel 11 in the driver caused the hardware to set channel 5
etc. Because I didn't figure out the pattern to fix the algoritm yet,
I fixed it in a workaroundish way by defining a small "table" with
offsets for the 11b channels to get the right results. For example, if
we want to set channel 11 (2462MHz), we add an offset of -30MHz, and
feed the result (2432MHz ^= channel 5) into the unmodified
AR5212/AR5112 RF setup function.
Long description for a commit message, but it needed some time to
figure it out. It is still not perfect, needs some more work, and it
doesn't work in all cases; but it allows to use newer chipsets in 11b
mode restricted to 1 or to 2Mbit/s. 11a mode seems to work without
problems so far.
----- End forwarded message -----
