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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