# mac80211 causing kernel panic

## Bobbias

It seems to be quite random, though it happens more often if I'm using the net heavily (chromium with a bunch of tabs open, etc.) but my wireless drivers seem to be causing a kernel panic. The stack trace it shows doesnt mean much to me, but I can tell that it's definitely something in mac80211/brcm80211 thats causing it.

I've got the broadcom firmware bcm43xx-0.fw because I have 

```
09:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation Device 4357 (rev 01)
```

 as my wireless controller (I believe it's a broadcom brcm43225).

What do I do here? I'd like to avoid these panics, because they are annoying and I can't afford not to have wireless access.

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## BradN

Without becoming a wireless driver developer yourself, probably the best course of action is trying different kernel versions and see if you can find something that does work reliably.  Once you determine a working kernel version and a non-working kernel version, you can do a bisection test to find the exact change that broke it (and make a nice bug report with such).

See this thread for some more info:  https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-834520.html

If you can't find a kernel version that works, about all you can do is look for and file a bug report if there isn't one.

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## Bobbias

Thanks, it sucks that that's the only thing I can do. I'm updating to 2.6.38 now to see if that fixes anything. A quick look over the change log doesn't show anything relevant, unfortunately.

The worst part about this is that although it's reproducible, it's not reliably so. I could have the internet running for hours, or I could start ktorrent, and have it panic immedately, or I could start ktorrent and wait an hour. I never know when it is going to do it to me.

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## BradN

There's always the possibility of using ndiswrapper if the kernel drivers aren't good enough, maybe that's worth trying also.

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## Bobbias

I googled ndiswrapper quickly and noticed that it seems there's not much support for 64bit drivers. Since I'm running a multilib system could I still use it for 32 bit drivers? Also, the laptop I'm on is normally only available with windows 7, meaning that all the vendor specific drivers are out of the question.

Is it still worth trying?

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