Things that needed repairing:
- Updating the AR9280 initvals to the Linux ath9k ones resolved the radio initialisation issues, making everything magically stable!
- The v4k EEPROM code (for the AR9285/AR2427) needed some surgery to reflect what was really going on. In particular, the 8 bit radio bias values in the AR9280 (v14) EEPROM are actually lots of 4 bit values; so the bias values being written to the radio were woefully incorrect. This restored AR9285 stability and made the AR2427 function.
- The AR9280 RF registers need an extra delay before being written to. I guess since the earlier radios are externally connected via single-bit IO (and thus shift registers are involved), the later radios are too. Without this delay, the AR9220 panics on my MIPS board and I would get occasional unexplained resets when I configured an AR9280 on my eeepc. This fix has resolved both those issues.
The AR2427 baseband seems to hang after a few hours of use, requiring a complete cold (power off) restart. There's some more initialisation code I need to port from ath9k and there's a lot of AR9280/AR9285 calibration code which I need to port over. I hope porting these two over will fix the stability issues that I was seeing. There's also some noise floor calibration fixes from ath9k which I need to integrate into the FreeBSD-HEAD tree.
So, there's been quite a bit of progress! I've had reports from users that the AR9280, AR9285 and AR9220 support is now very stable; much more stable than before.
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