Ongoing problems with the "ath" interface - is any relief in sight??

[Ross Finlayson]

For several months now, the "ath" interface has been spazzing out at 
random times (in systems that are acting as wireless base stations). 
For example:

Jul 28 21:44:47 ns kernel: ath0: stuck beacon; resetting (bmiss count 4)
Jul 28 21:44:47 ns kernel: ath0: ath_reset: unable to reset hardware; 
hal status 3
Jul 28 21:45:08 ns kernel: ath0: device timeout
Jul 28 21:45:08 ns kernel: ath0: stuck beacon; resetting (bmiss count 4)
Jul 28 21:45:08 ns kernel: ath0: ath_reset: unable to reset hardware; 
hal status 3
[and then the interface stops working]


%cat /etc/motd
FreeBSD 6.1-STABLE (GENERIC) #6: Thu Jul 27 20:55:43 PDT 2006

The error isn't always the same, however.  Often it is
	ath0: device timeout
or
	ath0: discard frame w/o packet header
or even
	arp: unknown hardware address format (0x4500)

In each case, however, the "ath" interface stops working Immediately 
after the error report, so I don't believe that the latter two error 
reports are legitimate.  I'm wondering it perhaps there's a memory 
smash somewhere that's corrupting some driver data structures 
(thereby causing bogus error reports in addition to stopping the 
interface from working)?

The last time I asked about this, someone speculated that 'power save 
mode' was the culprit.  Unfortunately, the system is running in a 
coffee shop that provides public WiFi, so it's not possible to stop 
clients from using power save mode.

On my system, these errors are often happening several times a day. 
Has anyone else run into frequent problems like this, and is anyone 
looking into a solution?

	Ross.