On Sun, Sep 27, 2015 at 12:13:08PM +0200, Giovanni Bechis wrote: > Before this athn(4) I had, on this same laptop, an urtwn(4) wireless device > that worked fine.
This might be related to power consumption. Perhaps the athn draws more power than urtwn does and triggers hub driver problems more reliably. That's just a theory, though. I have no direct evidence. I've got a different ehci(4) USB host controller where the athn device works when plugged in directly but fails to even load the firmware when plugged in behind a hub, which looks like a power issue to me. See http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=143645936727569&w=2 What I do know is that athn on USB works perfectly fine in various other configurations I could test. Try your adapter with OpenBSD on various machines and I bet you'll see that in some machines it will expose problems and in some it won't.
