QCA6174 showing terrible performance when connecting via WPA3-SAE

[Kalle Valo]

Eric Park <me at ericswpark.com> writes:

> I had the opportunity to test the connection with another router (Asus
> RT-AX56U) today and it negotiated with WPA2-PSK, PMF default on, on 5
> GHz. I ran a speedtest and got 20 Mbps both up/down.
>
> I then ran the `nmcli connection modify <SSID2> wifi-sec.pmf 1` and
> after reconnecting it connected with PMF disabled. (I think the reason
> it worked this time is because of WPA2-PSK -- there's probably some
> way of making it work with WPA3 APs and `nmcli` but I don't know the
> correct commands to give in order to make that happen.) The speedtest
> increased to 100 Mbps both up/down, and that's the WAN limit -- I'm
> pretty sure if I ran a iperf3 inside the LAN it would've been much
> faster.
>
> I think the PMF implementation in ath10k, at least for the QCA6174
> chip, has some issues as it has consistently worsened performance on
> two out of two sample APs I've tested it on.

Yeah, clearly something is wrong somewhere but difficult to say where
exactly. I got a private comment that one possible cause might be that
the first ADDBA frame is not decrypted correctly and the aggregation is
not working. Broken aggregation would explain the decrease in
throughput.

This is of course just a theory. I don't know how familiar you are with
802.11 protocols but that is something to investigate. Unfortunately I
have very little time for ath10k nowadays.

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