Hi All,

I have a strange problem, I purchased one of the Atheros wifi adapters, and it gave kernel panics regularly on Slackware.
The adapter is: Alfa Network AWUS036NHA – USB WiFi Adapter, 150 Mbps, 802.11b/g/n, RP-SMA, AR9271L Atheros Chipset

I googled this but didn't find anything much, so I bought another one thinking it was faulty, and the same thing happened. So I switched Slackware to running inside Proxmox, and passed through the Atheros into the guest, but this time it panicked the host, so I had to hard-reset Proxmox. It did this a few times until I unplugged the adapter.

I can find problems like this described with this adapter but the only web references I can find are from years ago, so I don't understand what's going on when I see this problem so reliably, across different operating systems and across different host systems but nobody else seems to have a problem.

So is anyone else using USB wifi with Slackware? What are you using? Is it reliable?

Many thanks!

Are you able to test on another computer?

Another user was having a problem with the same wireless adapter. I asked the question there, but haven't received an answer yet, but what version of Slackware are you using? The post I linked (currently the second to last post on that thread) has a link with a Mint user who was able to upgrade their kernel to fix the problem.

I tried a few versions of the kernel, including the latest (as of a few months ago). However this problem doesn't seem to be unique to Slackware, as it crashed the HOST operating system which is Debian-based Proxmox.

I do have a longer USB cable and I wondered if that can be causing this. Perhaps some timing is changed. It was an expensive high quality cable 3m long, that I purchased specially for connecting to a USB wifi adapter because I knew the adapter might draw significant current. I suppose I should try with a short cable and see what happens.