WiFi card can see and connect to other networks, but hostapd doesn't broadcast anything

[Sam Jaeschke]

It turns out it's nothing to do with hostapd at all. It's part of the
quirks of embedded systems that require device trees to be written
correctly to specify the devices on the system, and it seems to be
that the PCIe bus interrupt wasn't set up right (it's still surprising
that hostapd uses features of the WiFi/PCIe that require the interrupt
to be set correctly, whereas the standard/non-ap mode works even when
the interrupt is not set correctly). It's a device tree issue - still
trying to work out how it should be specified. Anyway, carry on.

On 8 January 2016 at 18:50, Sam Jaeschke <sam.jaeschke at maptek.com.au> wrote:
> I am using OpenEmbedded on an embedded system. I had a copy of the
> build recipes from towards the start of last year, and got my ath9k
> WiFi card and hostapd v2.2 working. It came time to update all the
> scripts to the Poky Jethro 2.0 release (from Nov 2015 -
> http://cgit.openembedded.org/meta-openembedded/tree/meta-oe/recipes-connectivity/hostapd/hostapd?h=jethro).
> Some PCIe and WiFi things needed updating to make that work, so when I run:
>> iw dev wlan0 scan
> it showed me the list of networks it could see. So far, so good.
> However, hostapd was upgraded to 2.4, and it stopped working. All the
> messages it output was fine and normal, and there was no indication
> that anything was wrong (I diffed the initialisation output and
> hostapd_cli 'status' with the earlier working version) - however other
> devices couldn't see the SSID appear in their network list, so it's as
> though nothing is being broadcast. The WiFi card still works in
> standard (non-AP) mode.
> I kept all the recipes at the Jethro Nov 2015 release, except I
> grabbed all the recipes and configuration I had used for hostapd 2.2
> from before.. so exactly the same code and config. I tried running it,
> and it still behaves the same way - everything it outputs is fine, but
> there is nothing broadcast that can be seen by other WiFi devices.
>
> 1. Is it possible that WiFi kernel drivers, etc. can work fine in
> normal mode but not AP mode?
> 2. Any ideas on how I could track down this problem?
> 3. Any ideas why hostapd pretends everything is fine?!
>
> Many thanks,
> Sam



-- 
Sam Jaeschke
Maptek | Software Engineer

63 Conyngham Street, Glenside, SA 5065, Australia
Tel: +61-8 8338 9222 | Dir: +61-8 8338 9265 | Fax: +61-8 8338 9229
sam.jaeschke at maptek.com.au | www.maptek.com

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