FreeBSD 6.1 and Prism-based wireless cards

[Vicknesan AYADURAI]

On Fri, 13 Oct 2006, Stan Barber wrote:

> I just upgraded my Compaq E500 from 5.4 to 6.1. Everything works fine except 
> the Prism-based wireless card. It worked fine under 5.4. I verified the card 
> didn't blow up under XP and Linux. I have even tried a different card that 
> was working fine in the Linux laptop.
>
> Right now, it looks  like it must be something about FreeBSD 6.1 (I have all 
> the updates to p10 installed as well).
>
> Here is the error when either Prism-based card gets plugged in:
>
> wi0: timeout in wi_cmd 0x0000: event status 0x8000
> :init failed
> device_attach: wi0 attach returned 6
>
> By the way, the driver does correctly identify each card from the cis data.

Hi Stan,

This reminds me of the problem I had with my 3Com Etherlink PCMCIA 
ethernet card (battle-tested, working solidly since FBSD-2.2.8R) which 
ceased to work when I went from 5.4R-->6.1R on my Thinkpad.

The general problem seems to be the 'magical' IRQ allocation upon card 
insertion/detection, and subsequently some kind of collision with 
ACPI. The card was assigned IRQ 9 with 5.4R, but IRQ 10 with 6.1R, 
which was also used for ACPI-stuff.

The trick, which fixed my problem at least, was to force a different 
IRQ assigment (from 10) for 6.1R. I posted what worked for me at:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hardware/2006-September/003781.html

Hope this helps,
vick