[LEDE-DEV] Backporting stuff to lede-17.01

[Álvaro Fernández Rojas]

Hi Rafał,

El 02/02/2017 a las 12:32, Rafał Miłecki escribió:
> Hi,
> 
> There are few changes that recently went into master and I'd like to
> see in lede-17.01. Let me what do you think, if backporting any of
> these is a bad idea.
> 
> 1) bgmac support for external PHYs
> 6a853776a502 ("kernel: backport bgmac support for external PHYs")
> This adds support for some AP devices that don't have external switch
> or just don't use internal one. Driver is used by brcm47xx/mips74k and
> bcm53xx, I can test it (and I do) with both targets.
> 
> 2) hostapd support for complete logging
> 37b489fe0417 ("hostapd: backport support for sending debug messages to
> the syslog")
> This allows reading all error messages (and debugging ones if you
> enable them) from the syslog (logread command). I find it very
> important for debugging wireless/hostapd issues. This is a pretty
> simple single hostapd patch.
> 
> 3) brcmfmac update
> There were quite a few improvements/fixes for brcmfmac. That includes
> small fixes & debugging improvements. There are still some people
> reporting problems with brcmfmac so getting useful info even with
> 17.01 release would be desired.
> We use brcmfmac for BCM43602 & BCM4366 PCIe devices and we support 4
> routers with these. I own 3 of them so my testing should have a good
> coverage.
> One minor risk is I can't test brcmfmac with Raspberry Pi. The good
> thing is that all patches were backported separately (and in few
> commits) so any regression should be trivial to track.

I finally had some time to test this on my Raspberry Pi 3.
BTW, thanks for these improvements ;D.

For what I've seen on my tests, performance has really improved since I added support for the Raspberry Pi 3.
There were some issues causing packet loss, but now it seems that those problems are gone.
However, I'm still getting these spam messages "brcmfmac: brcmf_proto_bcdc_hdrpull: wlan0: non-BCDC packet received, flags 0x??", and don't know where they come from...
http://pastebin.com/1iEVLYQk
Should we keep that message from being printed for brcm2708?

P.S: I will keep my Raspberry Pi 3 running for a while in order to check that performance doesn't degrade over time.

Regards,
Álvaro.