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ath9k bugs and known issues

This page documents all known bugs for ath9k and issues. If you are on an old kernel or an old stable kernel you will want to read this. We try to keep this page updated as we merge important pages into Linux.

Contents

  1. ath9k bugs and known issues
  2. Reported bugs on ath9k
    1. All reported ath9k bugs
    2. All currently open ath9k bugs
      1. Issues being looked into
      2. Issues to be looked on queue
      3. Issues which have no takers yet
    3. All closed ath9k bugs
    4. Distribution bugs
    5. Invalid
  3. Most common known issues
    1. Minimal kernel requirements
      1. Ubuntu users
    2. Hangs with PCI devices and SMP systems
    3. DMA issues on 2.6.27
    4. Loss of connectivity after large file transfer on 2.6.28

Reported bugs on ath9k

This is a collection of bug reports both unresolved and resolved to help users track issues and to find patches for fixes which have not yet been merged.

All reported ath9k bugs

All currently open ath9k bugs

This is the list of all currently open filed bugs on kernel.org.

Issues being looked into

These issue are currently being looked into.

Issues to be looked on queue

These issues will be addressed next:

Issues which have no takers yet

Please add here important bugs reported on kernel.org you'd like to see fixed.

All closed ath9k bugs

This is the list of all closed issues on ath9k on kernel.org.

Distribution bugs

Invalid

Most common known issues

Minimal kernel requirements

You want at least these kernels to use ath9k:

  • >= 2.6.27.22

  • >= 2.6.28.10

  • 2.6.29.3

The 2.6.31 kernel seems to have quite a few issues and fixes for them have been merged onto 2.6.32. If you cannot upgrade to 2.6.32 completely or use compat-wireless stable release for this kernel consider merging some of these patches:

http://bombadil.infradead.org/~mcgrof/patches/ath9k/fixes-not-in-2.6.31-for-ath9k.txt

We are working on propagating some of these fixes for future 2.6.31.y releases.

Ubuntu users

Please refer to Ubuntu kernel release to Mainline kernel release map to find out which package name you need as well as from what repository (called "pocket"). If you have no clue what was just described please read the Ubuntu Wireless documentation.

Hangs with PCI devices and SMP systems

This issue was due to a hardware limitation on our PCI devices whereby our device's FIFO queue got filled up and caused a loop. This issue is only present on our 11n PCI devices, its not present on our PCI-express devices nor our legacy 802.11abg devices.

The fix was to serialize read/writes – a spin_lock around each read and write. This fix is not performed for PCI devices or non-SMP systems. This fix is present in 2.6.29, 2.6.28.10 and 2.6.27.22.

DMA issues on 2.6.27

DMA issues were present on first release of 2.6.27, these issues were easily reproducible on MacBook Pros. This issue was fixed on 2.6.27.8.

Loss of connectivity after large file transfer on 2.6.28

This issue was fixed in 2.6.28.1, the issue was caused by the fact that ath9k was configured to ignore beacons and mac80211 expects them, after a large data transfer it is possible the beacons could have been missed and mac80211 detects a timeout of waiting for beacons or receiving data.