wpi on NetBSD-4

[Stephen Borrill]

I'm using NetBSD 4.0_BETA2 to build modular xorg packages with pkgsrc
(local work dirs) mounted with NFS using a wpi(4) interface (i.e.
reasonably heavy use). After a while, the network status went to inactive
and so I got nfs send error 50. I tried to ifconfig down/ifconfig up but
got the following errors:
wpi0: could not allocate firmware DMA memory
wpi0: could not load firmware

The firmware was clearly already loaded as I'd built up about 60 packages
using it!

[Daniel Carosone]

I'm using NetBSD 4.0_BETA2 to build modular xorg packages with pkgsrc (local
work dirs) mounted with NFS using a wpi(4) interface (i.e. reasonably heavy
use). After a while, the network status went to inactive and so I got nfs
send error 50.

There may be updates to the driver soon; perhaps they will help this.

wpi0: could not allocate firmware DMA memory wpi0: could not load firmware
The firmware was clearly already loaded as I'd built up about 60 packages
using it!

The firmware is reloaded each time the chip is started, and the chip is
stopped (and I think/hope mostly powered off) when ifconfig'd down.

Unfortunately, the firmware loader has an annoying requirement to
allocate memory in a contiguous chunk, and that can fail after some
running time. One way to work around this is to free up or page out
enough memory that there's a suitable chunk free. Quitting a big app,
or something like:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null bs=512m count=2

usually does the trick. adjust bs according to the amount of physical
ram in the machine (ie don't make it larger so you're paging dd
itself).

Hopefully the underlying issue will be fixed with a smarter loader.

--
Dan.