ARP Problems with madwifi + hostapd + bridge

[Frederico Marques]

Hi list,

I've searched the madwifi tickets and mailing lists for this problem,
but I couldn't find anything related. I have a voyage linux box
(kernel 2.6.20-486-voyage) acting as a router, running madwifi (trunk
r3762) with a Wistron CM9 (ath0). I have also configured a bridge br0
(eth5 + ath0). I'm also running hostapd version 0.5.10 for WPA PSK
with the support for madwifi driver and bridge mode.

My hostapd.conf for bridge/madwifi:

interface=ath0
bridge=br0
driver=madwifi

I'm having problems with ARP on the br0 bridge. Some machines
connected to the wired interface(eth5) of br0 cannot find the mac
address of some clients connected on the wireless interface (ath0).
Running a tcpdump on eth5 I can see the ARP request from the wired
connected machines, and those ARP requests also appear on ath0. But,
for some reason, I can not receive a ARP reply and even running a
tcpdump on a client connected to the wireless side, I do not see any
ARP request.

The kernel has a patch to enable Routing and NAT Extensions:

http://www.ssi.bg/~ja/#routes-2.6
http://www.ssi.bg/~ja/routes-2.6.20-14.diff

Don't know if this has any code that could interfere with hostapd.

I can only solve this temporarily by resetting the ath0 interface. The
router itself doesn't have any problems whatsoever with ARP/L2.

Do you think it could be a problem related to hostapd? How
can I debug more useful info ?

Thanks for any help,

Fred