Created attachment 218029 [details] Patch to unlock the wifi ic before calling ieee80211_check_scan() While adapting the ieee80211 stack to NetBSD I ran into a locking issue whenever scans are started. I don't know if locking the wifi IC in FreeBSD allows for recursion - in NetBSD it doesn't and all scan starts will result in a "locking against myself" assertion with LOCKDEBUG kernels. The call here comes in via the ic_newstate callback, which always is called with IC locked (see also the assertion a few lines above), but the ieee80211_check_scan() function (and indirectly ieee80211_check_scan_current() which calls it) will lock the ic again. Simple patch to work around attached.
Oh, I'd /totally love/ the comlock to be non-recursive in freebsd. That would force us to tidy up a whole lot of things. Maybe we should add some _locked() versions that expect the lock held, and use those? I'd like to avoid the unlock/<thing>/relock pattern because it is racy as the state can change in that window. (The scan code is notorious for being bad at this..)
Created attachment 218053 [details] Alternative fix: add ie80211_scan_current_locked() and use that Yes, unlocking/relocking is evil, but this variant looks a bit bloated - better pass an argument telling we already hold the lock? Martin