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#1 2012-03-09 20:56:46

hiveNzin0
Member
Registered: 2011-10-02
Posts: 84

[ath9k] something related to wifi causes freezes

Good evening,

I use ArchLinux 64bits, my system is up to date and I bought a WiFi PCI card (TP-LINK WN851ND). The drivers are in the kernel : ath9k.

I had to remove the card because I had some freezes short time after booting KDE. Now it seems okay so far.

The computer completely freezes, I can't even access another tty, I have to hard reboot.

I configured the wifi with Newlan from AUR and netcfg (I tried wicd at first and that's when the crashs began so I uninstalled it and I tried with newlan).

I tried to grep for errors in /var/log/ but there is too many errors and I don't know what exact terms I should look for to find the problem.

For the moment, I have a wired connection so it's okay but I would prefer to have the WiFi too.

Another thing, I have Gnome on my laptop and there is the network manager where I can configure everything network related (openvpn, wifi, wire, ...). Is there something similar for KDE ?

Thanks a lot.

Last edited by hiveNzin0 (2012-03-11 10:36:04)

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#2 2012-03-10 08:08:00

hiveNzin0
Member
Registered: 2011-10-02
Posts: 84

Re: [ath9k] something related to wifi causes freezes

Okay, apparently, it's not the drivers. I put it back and booted and it works fine.

# lsmod | grep ath
ath9k                  87407  0
ath9k_common            2096  1 ath9k
ath9k_hw              347154  2 ath9k_common,ath9k
ath                    14802  3 ath9k_hw,ath9k_common,ath9k
mac80211              228527  1 ath9k
cfg80211              172260  3 mac80211,ath,ath9k

Maybe there is a conflit ? How can I find all the packages related to network (networkmanager, wicd, netcfg, ... ?).

Here is my DAEMONS from rc.conf

DAEMONS=(hwclock syslog-ng dbus network dhcp4 openvpn crond kdm)

I can see in the rc.conf archwiki that I can create profiles for my connection. I created one for my wifi but not for my wired one. I never needed it. Should I do it now that I also have a wifi profile ?

Thanks !

edit :

I tried to setup a profile for eth0. I changed the daemons to something like !network net-profiles ... but I got a freeze when loading KDE, I couldn't reach the desktop. The wifi wasn't activated at that time.

I use a script in rc.d called wifi but it was not activated in the daemons : !wifi

cat /etc/rc.d/wifi
#!/bin/bash
newlan -u wifihome

Last edited by hiveNzin0 (2012-03-10 09:49:05)

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#3 2012-03-11 08:39:07

hiveNzin0
Member
Registered: 2011-10-02
Posts: 84

Re: [ath9k] something related to wifi causes freezes

Hi,

I removed networkmanager and networkmanager-openvpn because I don't need them. I tried to boot in runlevel 1 and just started the wifi.

I updated my system (just chromium and another package) but it was slow (maximum 100ko/s instead of 800ko/s and I wasn't connected to a VPN).

After a while, I tried to edit /etc/rc.conf and I got a freeze so at this point, can I be sure that there is a problem with the wifi card kernel drivers ? I don't know what other things it could be.

I'm trying to find the errors in /var/log but nothing helpful so far.

Thanks.

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#4 2012-03-11 10:41:46

hiveNzin0
Member
Registered: 2011-10-02
Posts: 84

Re: [ath9k] something related to wifi causes freezes

Okay, I have some news again.

I bought the same PCI card (TP-LINK WN851ND) twice. One for my main computer (ArchLinux) and one for my server (Debian).

I installed it on my server and configured the wifi with the debian documentation. It worked but after a while, I got the same freeze I have with ArchLinux and my server doesn't have any desktop environment.

The problem is that I can't find the damn error in the folder /var/log. I even moved temporarily all the logs in a folder and started the wifi again the make my computer crash but nothing in the log (nothing I would understand as the problem of course).

Does somebody have an idea to point out what the problem is to help me fix it ? I don't think it's a conflict, I think it's driver related but if I have to submit a bug report, I need to give the developers something to work with.

Thanks a lot.

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#5 2012-03-16 07:37:21

hiveNzin0
Member
Registered: 2011-10-02
Posts: 84

Re: [ath9k] something related to wifi causes freezes

Hi,

I still have my problems. I submitted a bug report in the wireless-kernel section : https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42903

So in summary, the computer freezes with ArchLinux, Debian, Ubuntu Live CD. I tried with compat wireless for ArchLinux so I have the most updated drivers. I can't get the netconsole system to work unfortunately. When the computer freezes, I don't see anything on the remote login terminal.

Does anybody have an idea to help me find out what the problem is ?

Thanks.

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#6 2012-03-20 12:02:10

hiveNzin0
Member
Registered: 2011-10-02
Posts: 84

Re: [ath9k] something related to wifi causes freezes

Hi,

for those interested a patch has been created. I didn't test it yet but a developer seems confident about it.

The bug appears with something related to TKIP for the wifi.

Please find the patch in the bugreport I submitted.

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