HostAP Hard Lockup

[Petr Simandl]

Hi all,
  we have the same problem on our routers. During a "heavy" transfer the system hangs. I have three wifi cards xi626 and one eth0
wlan0 managed
wlan1 and wlan2 master
eth0 local net on
P200 64MiB ram and intel chipset and/or
P166 64MiB ram and via chipset
(both RH73, 2.4.21pre2, WE15, WT26, cvs hostap)

With the stable version hostap-2002-09-12 it was enough to freeze the router just by a transfer of  few megs of
data. I have just invoked ftp transfrer through a path ftp_box>wlan0>air>wlan0>my_router>eth0>my_linux_box and the
router was frozen.

After I've changed to cvs version (in ~ 29 december) it is much more stable and I can not make it frozen
from my_linux_box anymore. The changelog tells that there were some cleanups with the respect of  interrupt
handling. It was the step to the right direction I think.

But the system is now still freezing when any client is invoking a data transfer through the path
ftp_box>wlan0>air>wlan0>my_router>wlan2>air>win_box
Seems like the system still can lost interrupts under pressure. No logs are generated just our hotsanic traffic graphs
on interfaces shows that there was a big transfer of data.

Here in Czech Republic is growing wifi community that is using hostap. We have now several tens of
routers (one of them is mine) spread mainly over Prague and I think everybody will be happy to help
with testing hostap. Please feel free to ask for that (or for more detailed report).

For now my workaround is using a watchdog circuit that generates a reset when the router is frozen (my router record is 31 reboots - that was
during testing) Traffic shaping is reported to help as well (I have not
tried it).

have a nice day
Sima
www.simandl.cz

James Lewis wrote:
>Hi Everyone,
>I'm using HostAP with a netgear MA311.  I've observed a hard lock up on kernel versions 2.4.18 and 2.4.20.  Whenever my client (unsure of the chipset) is transferring a large amount of data, the host PC will lock up enitrely.
>efore I post log information that I was able to collect (which isn't much) is there a known incompatiability with HostAP (oct-12-02) and a Netgera MA311?
>Thanks in advance,
>James
>