I've installed OpenBSD 5.3 release onto two machines: the laptop (amd64) and main "desktop" (i386). dmesgs for each are attached to this post.
On each machine I have the same trouble with a USB wireless N adapter: the firmware won't load. The adapter is a NETGEAR WNA1100, based on Atheros chip. Excerpted from one of the dmesgs are the following lines:
Code:
athn0 at uhub0 port 2 "NETGEAR WNA WNA1100" rev 2.00/1.08 addr 2
...
athn0: failed loadfirmware of file athn-ar9271 (error 2)
athn0: could not load firmware
The firmware package athn-firmware-1.1p0 was installed using fw_update(1). I also tried an older package athn-firmware-1.1, with the same result (not surprising since the firmware file
athn-ar9271 is the same in the two versions of the package).
The man page for the
loadfirmware(9) function says it returns an
errno(2) code on failure, and errno code 2 is "
No such file or directory". Well the files seem to be there:
Code:
-r--r--r-- 1 root bin 70624 Jun 16 2011 /etc/firmware/athn-ar7010
-r--r--r-- 1 root bin 70624 Jun 16 2011 /etc/firmware/athn-ar7010-11
-r--r--r-- 1 root bin 51280 Jun 16 2011 /etc/firmware/athn-ar9271
-r--r--r-- 1 root bin 2221 Jun 16 2011 /etc/firmware/athn-license
I also tried replacing
athn-ar9271 with the firmware file from Linux,
htc_9271.fw; same result, it wouldn't load. (The adapter works under Linux.)
Another data point: when I first got the adapter (1-2 years ago), I tried it under OpenBSD on another machine, and it did work then. So, there was at that time no problem loading the firmware for it.
I tried google-ing the error message above, but didn't find anything useful.
I wanted to try loading the firmware manually by writing a simple C wrapper for loadfirmware(9), to see what happens, but the man page doesn't say what library to link it with.
Any suggestions for how to proceed? Thanks!