Arch Linux

ngoonee

Forum Fellow

From: Between Thailand and Singapore

Registered: 2009-03-17

Posts: 7,354

ath9k - DMA failed to stop, couldn't reset chip

I've recently (~ 2 weeks) started having wifi issues on a 5 year old laptop which has been running fine on Arch all this while. My wifi would just die (in use) with 'DMA failed to stop' and 'couldn't reset chip' errors in dmesg. Only a reboot would bring it back.

Initially this happened 3 times in a workday (~ 8 hours), that night based on google searches I added nohwcrypt=1 and ps_enable=0 to /etc/modprobe.d/ath9k.conf and things seemed to improve.

Today I tried to setup SSH tunnels to my office, and I can reliably trigger the above messages when using forward SSH tunnel traffic. Normal traffic including heavy downloads does not seem to trigger any error (watching video, streaming music), it only seems to trigger when I:-

a) Connect via ssh (this doesn't trigger it yet) including tunneling
b) Start rdesktop using the SSH tunnel

I've gotten a max of 20 seconds connected after doing b) after a handful of tries today. I'm suspecting a hardware issue, but before I get a USB dongle for this laptop, anyone have any other suggestions on how to debug this?

lspci shows my network controller to be Qualcomm Atheros AR9485 Wireless Network Adapter (rev 01).

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