[gentoo-user] ipw2200 + Intel Pro Wireless 2915 a/b/g: "ipw2200: Firmware error detected. Restarting."

[fire-eyes <sgtphou@fire-eyes.org>]

I am having a very irritating problem with the wireless driver and card 
above. Sometimes, but not all the times, it gets into this phase where 
the wireless drops, comes back, drops, comes back (etc) and eventually I 
start seeing this in kernel logs:

ipw2200: Firmware error detected.  Restarting.

Unloading and reloading the module does not stop the issue, when it has 
begun. I have done some searching, and the typical advice is to make 
sure hardware crypto is off, by loading it like so:

modprobe -v ipw2200 hwcrypto=0

However this never stops it, or even causes it to calm down a bit.

The most frustrating thing, is that this does not happen all the time. I 
use multiple wireless networks. All of them wide open, except for one, 
which was mine at home with WPA. That AP since bricked (warning: avoid 
LInksys WRT54G v5's, i'm not the only one this happened to) so I can no 
loner test. But when I used it, i saw the same things as I am describing 
here.

Software and Hardware information:
IBM Thinkpad T43
Intel Pro Wireless 2915 a/b/g
Kernel 2.6.18.1-ifc (ifc is a very small intel fan control patch)
ipw2200-1.2.0
ipw2200-firmware-3.0
wpa_supplicant-0.5.5

Any ideas out there? I have talked to others who have seen this, and 
none of them ever solved it...

Gentoo Specific Information (some of this may be useful to others too)

Portage 2.1.2_pre3-r3 (default-linux/x86/2006.1/desktop, gcc-4.1.1, 
glibc-2.4-r3, 2.6.18.1-ifc i686)
=================================================================
System uname: 2.6.18.1-ifc i686 Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.86GHz
Gentoo Base System version 1.12.5
Last Sync: Tue, 24 Oct 2006 02:20:01 +0000
distcc 2.18.3 i686-pc-linux-gnu (protocols 1 and 2) (default port 3632) 
[enabled]
ccache version 2.3 [enabled]
app-admin/eselect-compiler: [Not Present]
dev-java/java-config: 1.3.7, 2.0.30
dev-lang/python:     2.4.3-r4
dev-python/pycrypto: 2.0.1-r5
dev-util/ccache:     2.3
dev-util/confcache:  [Not Present]
sys-apps/sandbox:    1.2.18.1
sys-devel/autoconf:  2.13, 2.60
sys-devel/automake:  1.4_p6, 1.5, 1.6.3, 1.7.9-r1, 1.8.5-r3, 1.9.6-r2
sys-devel/binutils:  2.17
sys-devel/gcc-config: 1.3.13-r4
sys-devel/libtool:   1.5.22
virtual/os-headers:  2.6.17-r1
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="x86"
AUTOCLEAN="yes"
CBUILD="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
CFLAGS="-Os -march=pentium-m -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe"
CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
CONFIG_PROTECT="/etc /usr/NX/etc /usr/NX/home /usr/kde/3.5/env 
/usr/kde/3.5/share/config /usr/kde/3.5/shutdown /usr/share/X11/xkb 
/usr/share/config /usr/share/texmf/dvipdfm/config/ 
/usr/share/texmf/dvips/config/ /usr/share/texmf/tex/generic/config/ 
/usr/share/texmf/tex/platex/config/ /usr/share/texmf/xdvi/"
CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK="/etc/env.d /etc/env.d/java/ /etc/gconf 
/etc/java-config/vms/ /etc/revdep-rebuild /etc/terminfo"
CXXFLAGS="-Os -march=pentium-m -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe"
DISTDIR="/usr/portage/distfiles"
FEATURES="autoconfig ccache distcc distlocks metadata-transfer sandbox 
sfperms strict"
GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://gentoo.chem.wisc.edu/gentoo/ 
ftp://gentoo.chem.wisc.edu/gentoo/ ftp://gentoo.mirrors.tds.net/gentoo 
http://mirror.datapipe.net/gentoo"
LINGUAS="en"
MAKEOPTS="-j5"
PKGDIR="/usr/portage/packages"
PORTAGE_RSYNC_OPTS="--recursive --links --safe-links --perms --times 
--compress --force --whole-file --delete --delete-after --stats 
--timeout=180 --exclude=/distfiles --exclude=/local --exclude=/packages"
PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/var/tmp"
PORTDIR="/usr/portage"
PORTDIR_OVERLAY="/usr/local/portage"
SYNC="rsync://rsync.namerica.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage"
USE="x86 3dnow X a52 alsa berkdb bitmap-fonts bzip2 cairo cdr chroot cli 
cracklib crypt dbus dlloader dri dv dvd dvdr dvdread eds elibc_glibc 
emboss encode fam ffmpeg firefox flac fortran gdbm gif gpm gstreamer gtk 
gtk2 hal input_devices_keyboard input_devices_mouse 
input_devices_synaptics isdnlog jpeg kde kdeenablefinal kernel_linux 
libg++ linguas_en mad mikmod mmx mp3 mpeg ncurses network nls nptl 
nptlonly ogg opengl oss pam pcre pdflib perl png ppds pppd pwdb python 
qt3 qt4 quicktime readline reflection sdl session spell spl sse ssl svg 
theora tiff truetype truetype-fonts type1-fonts udev unicode usb 
userland_GNU video_cards_ati video_cards_fglrx video_cards_radeon vorbis 
win32codecs xml xml2 xorg xv xvid zlib"
Unset:  CTARGET, EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS, INSTALL_MASK, LANG, LC_ALL, 
LDFLAGS, PORTAGE_RSYNC_EXTRA_OPTS
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