Kernel panic and reboot when loading Ralink RT2870 USB.
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I'd originally sought out support in this thread because I could not get the live environment nor an installed pfsense OS to boot but could install it just fine.
After some help on reddit and some tinkering I discovered there was a kernel panic when loading the driver ('run' is the driver name) for a Ralink RT2870 in a FitPC2i (a small SoC system with an Atom Z550). It was causing an endless boot loop. The Ralink card is connected directly to a USB header on the board. I tried removing it and replacing it with a mini PCI-E Atheros card only to find the PCI-E port on the FitPC2i motherboard is vestigial and not connected to anything. So I'm stuck with the Ralink for now.
Without the Ralink card plugged in I managed to boot and configure pfSense. After that I reconnected the card and everything booted fine up until I tried to configure the wireless interface. pfSense recognized a third interface and let me configure it as an access point. As soon as I applied changes pfSense crashed and went back into a boot loop.
This is the part where I should mention I've never used BSD before a few days ago when I tried to setup pfSense. I'm quite Linux proficient so I'm comfortable with the command line but the tools available to me are largely unfamiliar. I usually use nano as my cli text editor and for some reason on the pfSense CLI I'm having trouble using ee or vi. They only display text on a single line across the very bottom of the screen.
So I booted into single user mode (the only way it will boot, even safe mode bootloops when the wireless interface is configured or attempts to on boot) to start tinkering. Some Googling about blacklisting drivers/modules like in Linux got me to the point of adding hint.run.0.disabled="1" to /boot/loader.conf which got me booted back into pfSense multi user mode. So the good news is, this got me a crash report finally.
I submitted it at 12:15 Pacific time, about five minutes before the timestamp on this post. The source IP should end in .231
Please let me know if there is any further info I can add to help troubleshoot this. The wireless card itself works fine using Gentoo and wpa_supplicant using the generic wext userspace driver.
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You noticed there seems to be some problems with the RaLink and pfSense. I am have tested with RT5572/5592 and they have issues too, but the the pfSense 2.3 testing branch works well. Have you tried the nightly build. They are pretty solid.
The run driver does not support 802.11n mode.
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@Phishfry:
You noticed there seems to be some problems with the RaLink and pfSense. I am have tested with RT5572/5592 and they have issues too, but the the pfSense 2.3 testing branch works well. Have you tried the nightly build. They are pretty solid.
The run driver does not support 802.11n mode.
Ya, I tried the latest 2.3 snapshot as of about two days ago and it has the same kernel panic and reboot as soon as the interface attempts to come up. Actually I've tried about four different pfSense versions from pre-2.0 to 2.3 alpha. All have the same crash with the run driver.