Netgear WN311B Issues at BootUp

hytek

Is it possible to get support for the Netgear WN311B PCI Wireless adapter as an AP?

If this adapter is in the system, the liveCD will not boot at all. (page fault in kernel mode)
I have tried this card with the liveCD in an Intel and AMD based systems, and both i386 and AMD64, and this card will cause the liveCD at boot time to page fault and reboot everytime. I have also tried "safe mode" as well, and nothing will bring the system up.

For reference, this card: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833122163

Any workarounds, or better yet a driver for it? :)

Lastly, the card does work and works as an AP as I have tested it in Ubuntu 10.04. Let me know if you need anymore information.

Cheers.

hytek

Found this, but I do not know if these two are related now or not…

http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,27896.0.html

wallabybob

@hytek:

Found this, but I do not know if these two are related now or not…

What snapshot build are you using? (If one after about 1 Sep you likely have a different problem.)

Do you know what chipset is used in your card (Atheros? Ralink? something else?) Does the system startup get to report a driver attaching to your wireless card? If so, what driver?

jimp

Really need to know what snapshot you're on to say for sure. Try one from last Sunday/Monday (4th or 5th) since there were some other unrelated problems after then.

A capture of the panic info would be great if possible. If you switch to a developer kernel you could also get a backtrace if it happens on a newer snap to help track it down.

@hytek:

Lastly, the card does work and works as an AP as I have tested it in Ubuntu 10.04. Let me know if you need anymore information.

Apples and oranges. That doesn't mean much of anything to FreeBSD and its drivers.

hytek

@jimp:

@hytek:

Lastly, the card does work and works as an AP as I have tested it in Ubuntu 10.04. Let me know if you need anymore information.

Apples and oranges. That doesn't mean much of anything to FreeBSD and its drivers.

I understand, it was more of a statement to show that the card "works" and is not the root of the problem (hw failures).

And I believe the chipset is Broadcom BCM4321 iirc. (dont have the card in my hand atm to verify)

The snapshots I tried were:

pfSense_AMD64_20100913
pfSense_i386_20100912

I will try a newer snapshot, and/or the dev kernel and post back as soon as I can. Cheers.

wallabybob

It looks as if none of the supported Broadcom wireless interfaces are supported in AP mode (see https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AojFUXcbH0ROdHgwYkFHbkRUdV9hVWljVWl5SXkxbFE&hl=en#gid=0 for a quick summary of support.)

http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,26470.msg137779.html#msg137779 discusses the state of 802.11n support in FreeBSD and pfSense 2.0BETA.

If you really want AP support you will need to go with a card using a supported chipset from Atheros or Ralink.

hytek

No problems. I figured it would be iffy as to get it to work is a hack anyways.

So, no support to get the card working under pfsense.

We able to determine why the system halts and reboots when trying to boot the livecd at least? Leaving the card in for possible future use?

pfSense i386 20100920_2103

In the attached image, it hangs at the "Timecounters tick every 1.000 msec" for about 10 seconds. Then the Fatal trap 12 occurs. pfSense will never boot with this card in.

pfSenseNetgearFataTrap.jpg_thumb

jimp

Install from CD and choose the developer's kernel, and then when it panics, type "bt" at the prompt. It should give a bit more info

hytek

Decided to come back to this issue today, and seems like Broadcom has released Linux drivers last month.

These packages contain Broadcom's IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n hybrid Linux device driver for use with Broadcom's BCM4311-, BCM4312-, BCM4313-, BCM4321-, and BCM4322-based hardware. There are different tars for 32-bit and 64-bit x86 CPU architectures. Make sure that you download the appropriate tar because the hybrid binary file must be of the appropriate architecture type. The hybrid binary file is agnostic to the specific version of the Linux kernel because it is designed to perform all interactions with the operating system through operating-system-specific files and an operating system abstraction layer file. All Linux operating-system-specific code is provided in source form, making it possible to retarget to different kernel versions and fix operating system related issues.

http://www.broadcom.com/support/802.11/linux_sta.php

I have not tried these drivers yet, but what would you like me to do or try for the possibility of getting this card supported.

Cheers.

jimp

pfSense uses FreeBSD and not Linux, so those drivers don't help. :-)

Efonnes

Though it may help someone who wants to create a driver for FreeBSD.