I have a D-Link DWL-AG660 that has an Atheros based chipset. I use it on my IBM Thinkpad 600E laptop. I compiled and installed madwifi. The install goes fine, and the card has 2 indicators on it: link and activity. The Link light comes on and stays on (usually in windows it blinks with the activity). I do an ifconfig ath0 and it outputs:
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ath0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:0D:88:A2:3C:D9
BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:199
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)
Interrupt:11 Memory:d2c40000-d2c50000
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and reading the dmesg output:
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ath_pci: cache line size not set; forcing 4
ath0: 11a rates: 6Mbps 9Mbps 12Mbps 18Mbps 24Mbps 36Mbps 48Mbps 54Mbps
ath0: 11b rates: 1Mbps 2Mbps 5.5Mbps 11Mbps
ath0: 11g rates: 1Mbps 2Mbps 5.5Mbps 11Mbps 6Mbps 9Mbps 12Mbps 18Mbps 24Mbps 36Mbps 48Mbps 54Mbps
ath0: turbo rates: 6Mbps 9Mbps 12Mbps 18Mbps 24Mbps 36Mbps 48Mbps 54Mbps
ath0: 802.11 address: 00:0d:88:a2:3c:d9
ath0: Atheros 5212: mem=0x12c00000, irq=11
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It looks fine, now if I go to do anything with the card I get a seg fault. 2 Examples here:
setting the channel with iwconfig using the command “iwconfig ath0 channel 4”
now looking at the dmesg output again:
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Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at virtual address 00000000
printing eip:
00000000
*pde = 00000000
Oops: 0000
CPU: 0
EIP: 0010:[<00000000>] Tainted: P
EFLAGS: 00210292
eax: c3603da4 ebx: d0c86000 ecx: c3603d82 edx: d2bf4094
esi: c3603ebc edi: c3603da4 ebp: d0c86000 esp: c3603d50
ds: 0018 es: 0018 ss: 0018
Process iwconfig (pid: 1587, stackpage=c3603000)
Stack: d2bec182 d0c86000 c3603da4 c3603d80 c3603d82 c3603ebc c3603d82 c0139be8
00000301 d1eac310 c0139c0f c3603ea8 00140000 00140014 00140014 00140014
00140014 000f0021 0021000f 00000021 00140000 00000000 00000000 00000000
Call Trace: [<d2bec182>] [<c0139be8>] [<c0139c0f>] [<d2bf3238>] [<d2beac72>]
[<d2c0398a>] [<c012ff98>] [<d2bfe1c2>] [<c012736a>] [<c0297cc1>] [<d2bfe113>]
[<c0297388>] [<d2bfe113>] [<c0290948>] [<c02887aa>] [<c01459fe>] [<c0108d73>]

Code: Bad EIP value.
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same thing happens if I try to bring the card up in ifconfig, or if I try to set an address and netmask