[PC-BSD Testing] Kernel Panic on Wireless + shutdown

[Rod Clark]

On 2 Dec 2008, Rod Clark wrote:
> Fabrizio,
>
> Do you see "interrupt storm on irq 017" (or whatever irq)
> messages as part of this, when wifi starts to stall? That
> happens intermittently with my ath0 wifi connection on PC-BSD
> and makes wifi unusable for some period of time. This can happen
> every few days or sometimes more often. However, on my system it
> seems unrelated to startup or shutdown. But I have not seen this
> with the same hardware under Linux. The only solution so far
> seems to be not to run FreeBSD (6.x) with that wifi card.


This problem appears to have been resolved.

First, the Frenzy 1.1 live CD reported a wifi signal strength of
37, much higher than with PC-BSD. This made no sense, except
that Frenzy was running a minimal number of daemons and lighter
software in general. Something might have been interfering with
wifi.

After removing a variety of seemingly unnecessary daemons from
my (not too speedy anyway) PC-BSD system, for the past week wifi
operation has been stable and it no longer degenerates into
cycles of repeatedly searching for an access point, having
interupt storms, etc. It's still not as strong as with the
Frenzy disk, usually not above about 25, but it hasn't hiccupped
in over a week.

Here's what I stopped from running. Some of these probably
aren't part of the PC-BSD distribution and came with packages
that I once installed somewhere. Several are service discovery
daemons for networks, which I don't need on this old machine.
And in particular, gam_server baffles me.

/usr/local/bin/artsd                an audio system, not using
/usr/local/libexec/gam_server       what the heck is this?
usr/local/sbin/console-kit-daemon   somehow lets users access devices?
usr/local/etc/rc.d/001slpd.sh       service location protocol
usr/local/etc/rc.d/915resolution    Intel chipset video, not used
usr/local/etc/rc.d/avahi-daemon.sh  network service discovery
usr/local/etc/rc.d/denyhosts        unneeded? not running sshd
usr/local/etc/rc.d/ffserver         network service discovery
usr/local/etc/rc.d/fvcool           slows idle AMD CPU (n/a with FAH)
usr/local/etc/rc.d/hpssd            old HP printer utility, not used
usr/local/etc/rc.d/lircd            infrared comm daemon, not using
usr/local/etc/rc.d/mdnsd            advertise a service via Rendezvous 
usr/local/etc/rc.d/samba            not using this
usr/local/etc/rc.d/snddetect        instead, now starting oss in rc.conf
usr/local/etc/rc.d/snmpd            not using snmp
usr/local/etc/rc.d/snmptrapd        "   "   "
usr/local/etc/rc.d/xfs              a font server, seems obsolescent

-rsc