Recently I upgraded hal to version 0.5.11-r1 on my hardened laptop and since then Pulseaudio refused to work throwing the this error with --log-level=debug:

pulseaudio[22016]: module-hal-detect.c: Trying capability alsa
pulseaudio[22016]: module-hal-detect.c: Loaded 0 modules.

For some reason Hal fails to autodetect the ALSA hda-intel driver. So I had to hardcode it in /etc/pulse/default.pa

#Disable module-hal-detect
#load-module module-hal-detect
#Hardcode new stuff instead
load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:0
load-module module-alsa-source device=hw:0

After a bit of searching and troubleshooting I found the solution on the ArchWiki.

I haven't had the time to dig further into it to check wether the problem relates to my unsupported hardened GCC 4.

As I wrote earlier I've had some problems with the iwlwifi driver and my Intel 3945 wifi card. One workaround brought to my attention by again by Jeremy Olexa's blog post is to run G mode only.

This can easily be done in OpenWRT Kamikaze with:

ipkg install wl

In the config file /lib/wifi/broadcom.sh add the following line just after the killall statement:

wl gmode GOnly

Restart network/box.

With this workaround speed is back to normal, thanks to the initial blog post by Markus Golser here.