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Old 2nd June 2013
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IdOp IdOp is offline
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Join Date: May 2008
Location: twisting on the daemon's fork(2)
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This gets weirder. This morning I booted (i386) directly into OpenBSD. This time the firmware loaded, and the athn0 interface was there! Was it a case of cold boot vs warm boot? I rebooted, and again it was working.

So decided to check it out. Scan for APs:

# ifconfig athn0 scan

>> half a dozen reasonable results were returned

Scanned for APs again.

>> Lots of repeated kernel error messages fill the screen, after several seconds they stop.

Scan again.

>> Lots of repeated kernel error messages fill the screen, but they never stop.

So I disconnected the Netgear USB adapter. System crashes into debugger.

Tried rebooting a few more times. Firmware wouldn't load again.

As an experiment, I tried loading the firmware from OpenBSD under Linux. It would load, but the device never initialized. I have no idea if this ever had any chance of working, but it didn't.

Obviously, a lot of difficult and specialized work goes into writing these device drivers. Hopefully with a little more testing and debugging athn+9271 will come to full fruition.
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