wifi issues under -stable

[John Baldwin]

On Thursday, September 23, 2010 12:08:40 pm Torfinn Ingolfsen wrote:
> On Wed, 22 Sep 2010 16:46:43 -0500
> Jim Bryant <kc5vdj.freebsd at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > One (this one) has an intel pro wireless 3945ABG installed, which returns:
> > 
> > wpi0: <Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 3945ABG> irq 18 at device 0.0 on pci6
> > wpi0: Driver Revision 20071127
> > wpi0: 0x1000 bytes of rid 0x10 res 3 failed (0, 0xffffffffffffffff).
> > wpi0: could not allocate memory resource
> > device_attach: wpi0 attach returned 6
> > 
> > and the broadcom used in the other does the exact same thing.
> > 
> > I'm thinking that this isn't really a problem with the wifi, but may be 
> > a mini-pci-e issue.
> 
> More likelely, it is ACPI-related.  Simply put: many laptops have
> broken ACPI implementations. Other OS'es might have a workaround for
> them, but FreeBSD does not.

Well, in this case the breakage is probably that something in the ACPI
initialization clears the resource ranges in a PCI-PCI bridge.  However,
I would not quite say that ACPI is broken in that case as FreeBSD's
PCI-PCI bridge driver needs to handle this sort of case anyway in order
to truly handle hotplug devices and 'PNP OS == YES', so this is really
FreeBSD's fault rather than ACPI or the BIOS.

-- 
John Baldwin