I have MSI Z77 MPOWER motherboard, which includes Atheros AR9271 wi-fi chip, USB interface but part of the motherboard and not removable.
I have USB-stick installations of NetBSD-current amd64 and i386, now at 6.99.40. A problem now and in the past is that the firmware fails to load most of the time. I get message, near the end of /var/run/dmesg.boot : athn0: could not load firmware (35) I looked through source-code files but could not fine what error 35 was, like finding a needle in the haystack. I see through various device man pages that some firmwares are supposed to be in /etc/firmware, and some are supposed to be in /libdata/firmware. Why can't they all be in one or the other? Firmware was installed to /libdata/firmware, so I made a symbolic link /etc/firmware to /libdata/firmware. Is there any way to load firmware other than by rebooting? OpenBSD has fw_update. I checked against the Live USB OpenBSD 5.4 with cmp, and athn-ar9271 files matched, though I have never run wi-fi from OpenBSD. Live USB website is liveusb-openbsd.sourceforge.net . Tom
