RFC: Possible fix for wireless issue / Power consumption?

[Nicola Mfb]

On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 10:51 AM, Timo Juhani
Lindfors<timo.lindfors at iki.fi> wrote:
> Nicola Mfb <nicola.mfb at gmail.com> writes:
>> Just to remember that 2.6.28 kernels have wifi issue too, I just got
>
> Not all 2.6.28 kernels do. http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/ticket//2277
> lists that b8b36e5ec3db71d5 works just fine.

Is a prebuilt image+modules available for that revision?
It'd like to see how much it's really stable.
Last week I started a prototype application to control wpa_supplicant
over dbus, and my experiments are going slow because I'm not able to
find a really stable kernel.
As compile/deploy/test phases are frequent and as my tool
enables/disables wifi resource, drives wpa_supplicant, starts/stops
udhcpc at every lauch, after a bit every kernel crashes or wifi
becomes unusable.
I'm using standard AF_INET sockets to read signal quality and it's
broken as in iwconfig, while iwlist eth0 scan reports it correctly and
/proc/* reports always 0 values.
For sure my code is dirty and buggy, but it's only pure userspace, so
I have a buggy hardware phone or a serious care to the wifi driver was
not taken by OM even when it had payed employees. But as the second
seems absurd for me, I'm really thinking I have big hardware issues.

>> Linux debian-gta02 2.6.28-20090105.git69b2aa26 #1 PREEMPT Tue Mar 3
>
> I can not find the git revision 69b2aa26 from andy tracking tree.

Umh... it may be the debian kernel was packaged from a different branch.

>
>> The 99% of time I cannot reboot the device and have to remove batteries.
>
> Use watchdog so that you don't need to remove batteries?

I'll try it, is watchdog capable of hard reboot a very broken system?
some times I can log to ssh but "halt -n -f" segs faults, holding the
power menu for 10 seconds printks it but it does not reboot, while
sometimes it simply becomes a brick!.

>
> Btw, please consider adding these comments to the bug report so that
> they are easier to find.

I did not added them as they were revealed on 2.6.28, I prefer try the
patched 2.6.29 first.

Best Regards

    Nicola