Comment 27 for bug 275692

I experience this same issue of a non-functional ath_pci module with my Fujitsu P1610 running the latest Intrepid stable (installed yesterday). I can fix it manually as outlined below, but I'd much rather understand where the module needs to be listed in order to properly reload itself after suspend-resume.

In dmesg, my wifi card reports itself like this...
[ 23.323484] wifi0: Atheros 5424/2424: mem=0x54100000, irq=18

After a suspend, it cannot automatically reconnect, and choosing an ESSID manually also fails to connect, until you've reloaded the module.

if I just run...

sudo ifconfig ath0 up

...it doesn't seem to load up a functioning wireless adapter. I can select from the list of - possibly cached - local wifi networks, but it gives up trying to connect.

To fix I have to run...

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart
sudo modprobe -r ath_pci
sudo modprobe ath_pci

...although I was very surprised to find that adding these lines to /etc/default/acpi-support

MODULES="ath_pci"
SERVICES="networking"

...is somehow not equivalent with running these two commands manually, possibly the order matters. There's certainly some kind of timing issue, as sometimes it needs to restart the networking service as well as the module reload, and sometimes it just works with only the module reload.

If the module reload isn't enough to bring the network back up, an alternative sequence which works is to run the module reload, then reselect the wireless network ESSID manually from the drop down, which then connects successfully.