Francesco and Lorenzo, I modified my driver source to dump the firmware machine state whenever the b43_dma_handle_txstatus routine was called with an out-of-order cookie. With proprietary firmware, the test of a flood ping in one job and repeated tcpperf transmissions in a second ran for 10 hours without a single "failure". With the open-source firmware it failed after about 2 hours. Below are the saved status data. Listed for each item are the cookie, the sequence number, and the skb length. The 0x84 length values come from the ping. All of the out-of-order items come from tcpperf - is it significant that they are from the longer set? Note that a number of cookie/sequence pairs are missing, namely: 2064/9C1, 2066/9C2, 2068/9C3, 206A/9C4, 206C/9C5, 2072/9C7, 2076/9C9, and 207A/9CB. Cookie 206E is missing, but the next sequence (9C6) was attached to cookie 2070. This was not the first printout, but at this point cookie/sequence pair 2086/9D2 was received. It is a duplicate of item 22, thus its skb had been deleted and poisoned. I don't understand the firmware, but is it possible that there is a queue overrun, or some data in a queue are being missed? Feb 22 00:07:59 mtech kernel: Item 28: 0x205A 0x9BC 0x84 Feb 22 00:07:59 mtech kernel: Item 27: 0x205C 0x9BD 0x84 Feb 22 00:07:59 mtech kernel: Item 26: 0x205E 0x9BE 0x84 Feb 22 00:07:59 mtech kernel: Item 25: 0x2060 0x9BF 0x84 Feb 22 00:07:59 mtech kernel: Item 24: 0x2062 0x9C0 0x84 Feb 22 00:07:59 mtech kernel: Item 23: 0x2084 0x9D1 0x60C Feb 22 00:07:59 mtech kernel: Item 22: 0x2086 0x9D2 0x60C Feb 22 00:07:59 mtech kernel: Item 21: 0x2088 0x9D3 0x60C Feb 22 00:07:59 mtech kernel: Item 20: 0x208A 0x9D4 0x60C Feb 22 00:07:59 mtech kernel: Item 19: 0x208C 0x9D5 0x60C Feb 22 00:07:59 mtech kernel: Item 18: 0x208E 0x9D6 0x60C Feb 22 00:07:59 mtech kernel: Item 17: 0x2070 0x9C6 0x60C Feb 22 00:07:59 mtech kernel: Item 16: 0x2090 0x9D7 0x60C Feb 22 00:07:59 mtech kernel: Item 15: 0x2092 0x9D8 0x60C Feb 22 00:07:59 mtech kernel: Item 14: 0x2074 0x9C8 0x60C Feb 22 00:07:59 mtech kernel: Item 13: 0x2094 0x9D9 0x60C Feb 22 00:07:59 mtech kernel: Item 12: 0x2096 0x9DA 0x60C Feb 22 00:07:59 mtech kernel: Item 11: 0x2078 0x9CA 0x60C Feb 22 00:07:59 mtech kernel: Item 10: 0x2098 0x9DB 0x60C Feb 22 00:07:59 mtech kernel: Item 9: 0x209A 0x9DC 0x1B4 Feb 22 00:07:59 mtech kernel: Item 8: 0x207C 0x9CC 0x60C Feb 22 00:07:59 mtech kernel: Item 7: 0x209C 0x9DD 0x60C Feb 22 00:07:59 mtech kernel: Item 6: 0x209E 0x9DE 0x84 Feb 22 00:07:59 mtech kernel: Item 5: 0x2080 0x9CE 0x60C Feb 22 00:07:59 mtech kernel: Item 4: 0x20A0 0x9DF 0x84 Feb 22 00:07:59 mtech kernel: Item 3: 0x2082 0x9D0 0x60C Feb 22 00:07:59 mtech kernel: Item 2: 0x20A2 0x9E0 0x84 Feb 22 00:07:59 mtech kernel: Item 1: 0x20A4 0x9E1 0x84 Larry -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-wireless" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html