A few weeks ago, I was trying to help an inexperienced user on the openSUSE
Wireless Forum who was having "crashes" caused by his AR9285 device. The crash
turned out to be a kernel panic. As expected, I was not able to help him, and I
ordered one of these cards through E-bay. It just arrived, and I am able to
duplicate the panics. For me, they occur when changing from a WPA2-encrypted AP
to one with WPA encryption. When switching from WPA2 to WEP, the NULL
dereference does not occur; however, the connection fails.
I captured enough info from the debugging console to know that the panic results
from "BUG: unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at (null)" that
originates at ath_tx_start+0x2c0/0x4b0. The kernel is x86_64 and I am currently
testing kernel v3.4-rc1-214-g1ac7a92 from Linus's tree. I have not yet tested
the wireless-testing tree, but I do not see any commits there that appear to
address this issue.
The address of the traceback translates to line 1878 of
drivers/net/wireless/ath/ath9k/xmit.c, which is (ironically) a WARN_ON that says
WARN_ON(tid->ac->txq != txctl->txq);
By testing each of the pointers in the above statement, I determined that
tid->ac is NULL. Note: This statement is actually in ath_tx_start_dma(), which
appears to be in-lined by the compiler. My tests process the pointers from left
to right, and txctl or txctl->txq may also be NULL. The setting of tid is done with
tid = ATH_AN_2_TID(txctl->an, tidno);
I have not traced this any further yet to see why tid is not correct.
The full lspci output for my device is
06:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Atheros Communications Inc. AR9285 Wireless
Network Adapter (PCI-Express) [168c:002b] (rev 01)
Subsystem: Accton Technology Corporation Device [1113:d811]
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 20
Memory at f8000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 3
Capabilities: [50] MSI: Enable- Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit-
Capabilities: [60] Express Legacy Endpoint, MSI 00
Capabilities: [100] Advanced Error Reporting
Capabilities: [140] Virtual Channel
Capabilities: [160] Device Serial Number 00-15-17-ff-ff-24-14-12
Capabilities: [170] Power Budgeting <?>
Kernel driver in use: ath9k
I will be happy to provide any further information that may be required.
Larry
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