[ath9k-devel] received PCI FATAL interrupt

[Mihai Moldovan <ionic@ionic.de>]

Hello guys,

today I have updated to Kernel 2.6.29.1 using compat-wireless
(yesterday's snapshot) and got those messages in my kernel log ring buffer:

[   72.952758] ath9k: received PCI FATAL interrupt
[   77.087480] ath9k: received PCI FATAL interrupt
[   86.072429] ath9k: received PCI FATAL interrupt
[   86.074685] ath9k: received PCI FATAL interrupt
[   89.203901] ath9k: received PCI FATAL interrupt
[   89.448506] ath9k: received PCI FATAL interrupt
[   94.713862] ath9k: received PCI FATAL interrupt
[   94.869953] ath9k: received PCI FATAL interrupt
[  102.265172] ath9k: received PCI FATAL interrupt
[  102.281810] ath9k: received PCI FATAL interrupt
[  102.342217] ath9k: received PCI FATAL interrupt
[  102.347172] ath9k: received PCI FATAL interrupt
[  102.646480] ath9k: received PCI FATAL interrupt

I don't know where they are coming from, but I suspect those error
messages to be related to my other problems as well.

I own two Atheros cards, a PCI one (04:00.0 Network controller: Atheros
Communications Inc. AR5416 802.11abgn Wireless PCI Adapter (rev 01)) and
a PCIe one (02:00.0 Network controller: Atheros Communications Inc.
AR5418 802.11abgn Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01)) - both
connected to the same PC.

As already stated, OS is Linux 2.6.29.1 with compat-wireless-2009-04-06.

Both cards (and another ethernet card) are bridged together into br0
(this piece of information is of no real importance, though.)

wlan0 and wlan1 are set up to work via hostapd into MASTER mode. (WPA1
enabled, CCMP/PSK.)

They operate on two separate, non-overlapping channels with the same ESSID.

Most of the time, everything is working fine, it seems that either ath9k
or hostapd can't handle high traffic for a long time. This particularly
means, that streaming video is impossible, because the wireless
connection will eventually go down after a few minutes. Even more
interesting in this context is, that re-starting hostapd on the router
helps solving this problem, at least temporarly.

Another interesting effect is that the signal quality seen by my ipw2200
card goes up and down, that is, is unsteady when generating high network
traffic via WLAN. This can't be normal!

This all is particularly bad, because I would like to use this box as my
wireless LAN router... but currently this is more like wireless cheese
with a few lucky packets. :(

I'm open to any kind of helping rants.

Best regards,


Mihai Moldovan


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