WRT54g / b43 / mac802.11 BREAKTHROUGH

[Larry Finger]

On 08/22/2012 11:21 AM, Hauke Mehrtens wrote:
> On 07/18/2012 01:56 PM, Bastian Bittorf wrote:
>> hi devs!
>>
>> yesterday we had a breaktrough debugging b43 in our hackspace maschinenraum/m18[1,2]
>> at weimar.freifunk.net[3,4] - since a long time our darling wrt54g suffers from a
>> hanging wifi and bad performance[5], but the workaround is easy: now it's up to
>> you to fix the rootcause.
>>
>> our testsetup, where we could _reproduce_ reliably a stopping TX is like this:
>>
>> laptop ---lan--- "A"-wrt54g/adhoc ~~~   air  ~~~ "B"-anyrouter/adhoc
>>
>> now make a testdownload with the laptop from B.
>> wireless will stop working after ~10 seconds.
>>
>> wifi up will reanimate and our freifunk-cron.minutely-check
>> will do this automagically. (read further, this is not the solution)
>>
>> we tried to limit the rateset to e.g. lower rates, but this does NOT change
>> the behaviour. what works is: define a rateset on BOTH router which makes
>> it impossible to change the band, e.g.:
>>
>> iw dev $WIFIDEV set bitrates legacy-2.4 1 2 5.5 11
>> OR
>> iw dev $WIFIDEV set bitrates legacy-2.4 6 9 12 18 24 36 48 54
>>
>> now we had a great performance, 10 Gigabytes of wireless transfer,
>> no stopping TX anymore and an empty box of beer. three things to do now:
>>
>> 1) why does a band change (can be seen through minstrel) is a problem?
>>
>> 2) we have to make in config-option to force a band, or a rateset:
>> 	e.g. uci set wireless.radio0.hwmode=11g
>> 	e.g. uci set wireless.radio0.bitrates='6 9 12 18 24 36 48 54'
>>
>> 3) spread to word:
>>     there is a great frustration in the community about b43,
>>     but the old drivers _have_ to die, it's about time - really.
>>
>> thanks for your work,
>> bye storchi, andi, bastian + m18 crew
>>
>> [1] http://blog.maschinenraum.tk/
>> [2] http://blog.maschinenraum.tk/2012/07/15/bitcoin-vending-machine-exchange-euro-coins-for-bitcoin-wallets/
>> [3] http://wireless.subsignal.org
>> [4] http://wireless.subsignal.org/index.php?title=Main_Page_en
>> [5] https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/7552
>
> I tried this on some of my devices (BCM4318 G-PHY and BCM4322 N-PHY) and
> it is easily reproducible on all tested devices when restricting the
> rates to 11 and 12 MBit/s.
>
> I have the Broadcom device working as an Access point (on a MIPS SoC)
> and a Laptop with an Intel Wifi device is connected to it. I generated
> the traffic with iperf. If the Access Points sends the traffic the
> problem occurs, if it is just receiving there is not problem.
>
> After the problem occurred b43_generate_txhdr is called rarely ( every
> ~10 seconds) and I am not able to stay connected or connect to the
> network any more. I am not familiar with the internal flow in b43 or
> mac80211 could someone give me a hint where to look.
>
> I can not see any special changes between CCK and OFDM rates before it
> goes down there are many changes without a problem before it goes down.
>
> Currently I do not have a Broadcom wifi card running in a x86 device
> just mips devices could someone try to reproduce the problem on a x86
> device.
>
> I added the b43 mailing list and Rafał.

Hauke or Bastian,

Do you have any info whether the failure occurs with the change from OFDM to 
CCK, or vice versa? I am wondering if the radio needs a dummy transmission when 
the switch happens. I will try to put together a patch to test that hypothesis.

Larry