Acer Aspire AS5672 and Intel PRO/Wireless 3945abg

[Torfinn Ingolfsen]

Hi,

I have a Acer Aspire AS5672WLMi laptop. Among other things, it has an
Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG inside.
This laptop runs FreeBSD 6.1-stable. It also have a seriously broken
BIOS / acpi, which means that I have to run with acpi disabled in order
to make the wired network interface /bge0) work.
About a week ago, I found out about the experimental 3945 driver at 
http://damien.bergamini.free.fr/wpi-freebsd.tgz

so naturallu, I had to try it.
after making the driver compile and install, I did
kldload firmware
kldload wpi_ucode
kldload if_wpi

After that, I got this in /var/log/messages:
Jul 22 20:51:58 kg-home kernel: wpi0: <Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 3945ABG> mem 0xc8200000-0xc8200fff irq 17 at d
evice 0.0 on pci3
Jul 22 20:51:58 kg-home kernel: bus_dmamem_alloc failed to align memory properly.bus_dmamem_alloc failed to
 align memory properly.bus_dmamem_alloc failed to align memory properly.bus_dmamem_alloc failed to align me
mory properly.bus_dmamem_alloc failed to align memory properly.bus_dmamem_alloc failed to align memory prop
erly.bus_dmamem_alloc failed to align memory properly.channel 1 pwr1 0x008a pwr2 0x0086
Jul 22 20:51:58 kg-home kernel: channel 2 pwr1 0x0082 pwr2 0x008b
Jul 22 20:51:58 kg-home kernel: channel 3 pwr1 0x008f pwr2 0x0092
Jul 22 20:51:58 kg-home kernel: channel 4 pwr1 0x0092 pwr2 0x008f
Jul 22 20:51:58 kg-home kernel: channel 5 pwr1 0x0000 pwr2 0x0000
Jul 22 20:51:58 kg-home kernel: channel 6 pwr1 0x0080 pwr2 0x0080
Jul 22 20:51:58 kg-home kernel: channel 7 pwr1 0x0080 pwr2 0x0080
Jul 22 20:51:58 kg-home kernel: channel 8 pwr1 0x0081 pwr2 0x0080
Jul 22 20:51:58 kg-home kernel: channel 9 pwr1 0x007f pwr2 0x0081
Jul 22 20:51:58 kg-home kernel: channel 10 pwr1 0x0000 pwr2 0x0000
Jul 22 20:51:58 kg-home kernel: channel 11 pwr1 0xfffe pwr2 0xfffe
Jul 22 20:51:58 kg-home kernel: channel 12 pwr1 0x0001 pwr2 0x0001
Jul 22 20:51:58 kg-home kernel: channel 13 pwr1 0xfffe pwr2 0xfffe
Jul 22 20:51:58 kg-home kernel: channel 14 pwr1 0x0001 pwr2 0x0001
Jul 22 20:51:58 kg-home kernel: wpi0: Ethernet address: 00:13:02:3e:d4:ce

which looks promising. But it is followed by this:
Jul 22 20:58:18 kg-home kernel: setting h/w config 1200
Jul 22 20:58:18 kg-home kernel: wpi0: fatal firmware error
Jul 22 20:58:18 kg-home kernel: wpi0: timeout resetting Rx ring
Jul 22 20:58:18 kg-home kernel: wpi0: timeout transferring firmware
Jul 22 20:58:18 kg-home kernel: wpi0: could not load firmware
Jul 22 20:58:18 kg-home kernel: wpi0: timeout resetting Tx ring 1
Jul 22 20:58:18 kg-home kernel: wpi0: timeout resetting Tx ring 3
Jul 22 20:58:19 kg-home kernel: wpi0: timeout resetting Tx ring 4
Jul 22 20:58:19 kg-home kernel: setting h/w config 1200
Jul 22 20:58:19 kg-home kernel: firmware_get: failed to load firmware image wpi_ucode
Jul 22 20:58:19 kg-home kernel: wpi0: could not load firmware image 'wpi_ucode'
Jul 22 20:58:19 kg-home kernel: setting h/w config 1200
Jul 22 20:58:19 kg-home kernel: firmware_get: failed to load firmware image wpi_ucode
Jul 22 20:58:19 kg-home kernel: wpi0: could not load firmware image 'wpi_ucode'

which indicates that it has problem loading the firmware. 
Question: when making the formware module (wpi_ucode), everything exists in that module, including the firmware itself, yes? There are no other files I need?

Just for the hell of it, I booted the laptop with ACPI enabled (even if that means thwet bge0 won't work) and tried to get wpi working. It didn't. After booting, I did the usual
kldload firmware
kldload wpi_ucode
kldload if_wpi

here is the output from /var/log/messages:
Jul 28 16:19:32 kg-home kernel: wpi0: <Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 3945ABG> irq 17 at device 0.0 on pci3
Jul 28 16:19:32 kg-home kernel: wpi0: 0x1000 bytes of rid 0x10 res 3 failed (0, 0xffffffff).
Jul 28 16:19:32 kg-home kernel: wpi0: could not allocate memory resource
Jul 28 16:19:32 kg-home kernel: device_attach: wpi0 attach returned 12
Jul 28 16:19:32 kg-home kernel: bge0: <Broadcom BCM5789 Gigabit Ethernet, ASIC rev. 0x4201> irq 18 at device
 0.0 on pci4
Jul 28 16:19:32 kg-home kernel: bge0: 0x10000 bytes of rid 0x10 res 3 failed (0, 0xffffffff).
Jul 28 16:19:32 kg-home kernel: bge0: couldn't map memory
Jul 28 16:19:32 kg-home kernel: device_attach: bge0 attach returned 6

Clearly, this doesn't work at all. 
Note: I do not know why it prints the lines regarding bge0 here, I have not even tried to configure bge0.
It seems to be the same lines that are printed on boot for bge0:
Jul 28 16:18:42 kg-home kernel: bge0: <Broadcom BCM5789 Gigabit Ethernet, ASIC rev. 0x4201> irq 18 at device
 0.0 on pci4
Jul 28 16:18:42 kg-home kernel: bge0: 0x10000 bytes of rid 0x10 res 3 failed (0, 0xffffffff).
Jul 28 16:18:42 kg-home kernel: bge0: couldn't map memory
Jul 28 16:18:42 kg-home kernel: device_attach: bge0 attach returned 6

Well, this was just a test.
Any suggestions on what to try next to get this driver (wpi) working are welcome, as ndis doesn't work on the 3945abg.
-- 
Regards,
Torfinn Ingolfsen,
Norway