prism 2.5 timeout in wi_cmd 0x010b

[Marko Zec]

On Sunday 11 January 2004 04:16, Kevin Oberman wrote:
> > > I'll report what I see. It's pretty easy to test...just copy a
> > > multi-megabyte file from my laptop to my workstation over the
> > > wireless.
> >
> > I've been seeing and reporting that problem too, for a while now.
>
> It worked for me! I just copied 850 MB of data at an average transfer
> rate of 4.3 Mb/s with no problems. I never came close to this in the
> past. I hope Warner can comment on it (and commit it if he does not
> see a problem!)

wi0: <Intersil Prism2.5> mem 0xf8000000-0xf8000fff irq 6 at device 2.0 
on pci1
wi0: 802.11 address: 00:05:3c:06:9d:1d
wi0: using RF:PRISM2.5 MAC:ISL3874A(Mini-PCI)
wi0: Intersil Firmware: Primary 1.01.01, Station 1.07.04

After upgrading the firmware to 1.7.4, the problem is now gone for me as 
well! However, with my hack the throughput is slightly better (430 KB/s 
vs 350 KB/s without the hack), it seems that without the hack the card 
still loses some frames every now and than, yet it doesn't completely 
lock up as it would with 1.4.9 firmware.

Nevertheless, IMO my patch should never be committed, since it was just 
an empirical experiment, and it is still completely unclear what was 
the real cause of those intermittent lockups. It would be nice if more 
knowledgeable people could dig slightly deeper into this...

The moral of the story seems to be that firmware 1.4.9 probably 
shouldn't be used on mini-PCI Prism cards with current FreeBSD drivers.

Cheers,

Marko