Adding chipset powersave support to FreeBSD's Atheros driver

I've started adding some basic powersave support to the FreeBSD Atheros ath(4) driver. The NICs support putting parts of the device to sleep to conserve power but.. well, it's tricky.

In order to make things consistent, I either need to not do things when the NIC is asleep (for example, doing calibration when the NIC isn't running), but I also need to ensure that I force the NIC awake when the NIC may be asleep. During normal running, the NIC may have put itself into temporary sleep whilst waiting for some packets from the AP to signal that it needs to wake up. So I will also need to force the NIC awake before programming it.

So, before I start down the path of handling the whole dynamic power management stuff, I figured I'd tackle the initial bits - handling powering on the NIC at startup and powering it off when it's not in use. This includes powering it down during device detach and suspend, as well as when all of the VAPs are down.

This is turning out to be slightly more complicated than I'd like it to be.

The first really stupid thing I found was that during the interface down process, the VAP state change from RUN -> INIT would reset the BSS, which included re-programming the slot time. So, I have to wake up the hardware when programming that. It can then go back to sleep when I'm done with it.

Now there's some issues in the suspend path with the NIC being marked as asleep when it is being reset, which is confusing - the NIC should be woken up when ath_reset() is called. So, I'll have to debug these.

The really annoying bit is that if I read a register whilst the silicon is asleep, the reads return 0xDEADBEEF. So if I am storing the register contents anywhere, I'll end up storing and programming a potentially totally invalid value.

There's also some real problems with race conditions. I can put the power state changes behind a lock, but imagine something like this:

* ATH_LOCK; force awake; do something; ATH_UNLOCK .. ATH LOCK; do some more; put back to sleep; ATH_UNLOCK

Now, if a second thread puts the NIC back to sleep in between those two lock sections, the second "do some more" work may occur once the NIC was put to sleep by said second thread. So I have to correctly track if the NIC is being forced awake by refcounting how many times its being forced awake, then when the refcount hits zero and we can put it to sleep, put it back to sleep.

Once this is all done, I can start down the path of supporting proper network sleep - where the NIC stays asleep and wakes up to listen for beacons and received frames from the AP. I then choose to force the NIC awake and do more work. I have to make absolute sure that I don't queue things like transmitted frames or add more frames to the receive queue if it may fall asleep. There's also some mechanisms to have a transmit frame put the NIC to sleep - there's a bit that says "when this frame is transmitted, transition the NIC back to sleep." I have to go and figure out how that works and implement that.

But for now, let's keep it simple and debug just putting the NIC to sleep when it's not in use.