I'm wondering if this problem is just affecting me, or if madwifi just doesn't really work.

I tried to deploy a couple of Gateworks Avila boards running 7.07 today with
Atheros radios (Routerboard R52H). The pair of boards worked perfectly in the lab however
when I put them in the field the board in the AP mode suffered kernel crashes
any time traffic passed on the wireless interfaces. Basically it wouldn't stay up
for more than a minute or so.

It crashed both when our existing clients associated with it (they're mostly
tranzeo 802.11b cpe), and also when it was trying to associate with
its peer using 802.11a.

Is anyone running a 2.6 kernel with madwifi on arm hardware as an access point and having
success ? If so I'd like to hear about what version of the driver you're using.

Thanks.

After a few days pulling hair I can answer my own question :

The madwifi shipped in current (7.07, 7.09) versions of OpenWrt just doesn't
work at all on ixp425 hardware. It's completely broken, causing kernel panics.

madwifi regressed a fix for pci register access on this hardware some time in the past.
The fix didn't get put back in until recently, after r2568 that OpenWrt is using.

I've successfully built and deployed r2708 in OpenWrt 7.07 and it cures my
kernel hangs, crashes, and a bunch of other strange happenings.

Some links :

http://madwifi.org/ticket/1405
http://madwifi.org/ticket/1570

If anyone is interested in my patch set for r2708 and OpenWrt let me know.

Oooh, I would like that patch.  I just ordered 2 Avila boards and 4 Atheros abg radios that will need madwifi.

>> If anyone is interested in my patch set for r2708 and OpenWrt let me know.

Can you post your package (Makefile and patches) ?

I have already updated madwifi to the latest version in trunk. Please test it