Resets and kernel freezes

[Jouni Malinen]

On Thu, Oct 28, 2004 at 06:10:52PM +0200, Milan Krcmar wrote:

> - Do I still have to watch for card's functionality by generating some
>   traffic and "iwpriv wlanx reset 1" it when it fails to communicate?

I'm not sure whether I understood this question correctly. Do you mean
that the network connection does not work (i.e., cannot either send or
receive packets) but otherwise devices seem to be operational? Do you
see any error messages in 'dmesg' output?

> - Is the above mentioned reset command fatal with some probability to
>   the kernel (i.e. does the kernel freeze when I reset my card several
>   times).

I haven't been able to easily (if at all) to reproduce this kind of
issues with the latest driver versions. It looks likely that there is
some kind of hardware dependency and I just don't have "suitable"
combination in my testbed.

> Because of the resets being able to freeze the whole router, we have to
> add a hardware watchdog to every router. (The resets are triggered both
> by the driver itself and by the scripts watching for its functionality,
> mostly at time of heavy traffic load.)

Do you have any way of getting any other debug information than "it's
dead" when this happens? Do you see anything on the console when this
happen if full debug is enabled ('dmesg -n 8')? Do you have any system
that would support NMI watchdog that could help in debugging this?

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA