[Madwifi-users] Re: System Freeze

[Michael M. <sou...@mi...>]

I've had the system freeze problem that many others have described. Seems to be caused
by modprobe -r or by performing an ifdown then ifup.

Andargor on the madwifi-devel list did a trace and found a kludge that seems to work
for me...

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=11714868

It involves commenting out line 1006 in ath/if_ath.c

   ath_hal_setpower(sc->sc_ah, HAL_PM_FULL_SLEEP, 0);

Ominously, the comment before the line says:

   Set the chip in full sleep mode.  Note that we are
   careful to do this only when bringing the interface
   completely to a stop.  When the chip is in this state
   it must be carefully woken up or references to
   registers in the PCI clock domain may freeze the bus
   (and system).  This varies by chip and is mostly an
   issue with newer parts that go to sleep more quickly.

Not sure what it breaks, but at least it gets rid of the freezing problem.