QCA6174 showing terrible performance when connecting via WPA3-SAE

[Kalle Valo]

Eric Park <me at ericswpark.com> writes:

> On 4/25/24 5:51 AM, Kalle Valo wrote:
>
>> I do not use Network Manager or other connection managers when testing.
>> It's much more reliable to use wpasupplicant directly and you get full
>> control. I usually create a custom config file and then start the
>> supplicant manually. Some pointers:
>>
>> (...)
>
> I had some time today to test this, but unfortunately I couldn't
> figure out if wpa_supplicant was using WPA2 or WPA3. Trying to connect
> via `key_mgmt=SAE` caused `dhcpcd` to time out looking for carriers,
> so I guess it was connecting via WPA2. In any case the speed results
> were the same as disabling WPA3 on the router-side.

If you run wpa_supplicant -dddt (or similar) you get a lot of debug
output, I'm sure it will also include the cipher.

> The reason I'm sending this email despite not making much progress
> above is because it turns out I was chasing a red herring. The real
> problem behind the degraded throughput was 802.11w. The router was
> advertising support for it (802.11w capable but optional), but was not
> forcing clients that didn't have the capability (required mode).
>
> In Optional mode, I was experiencing the degraded performance. But
> after I disabled 802.11w on the router side, the speeds recovered to
> normal levels on both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands, even connected over
> WPA3.
>
> So I'm guessing something on the driver's side is signaling that it
> supports 802.11w, when in reality it doesn't or some bug with the
> implementation causes the speed to drop. Or maybe there's an overhead
> I'm unaware of when 802.11w is enabled? My limited understanding of
> 802.11w is that the management frames are protected to prevent deauth
> attacks.
>
> I'm not sure where to begin troubleshooting this, but in the interim
> can I disable the capability advertising on the driver-level? I don't
> want to disable 802.11w on my entire network, if possible.

Very good that you found this is 802.11w related. What is the make and
model of your router?

I don't know how well ath10k 802.11w support is tested and then it was
last tested. Do you happen to have other Access Points supporting
802.11w? That might help to pinpoint if 802.11w is completely broken in
ath10k or if this is an interoperability issue with ath10k and your AP.

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