IBSS support in ath10k - our test results and questions

Mon Apr 6 13:04:35 PDT 2015

So, IBSS RSN with ath9k works great on my systems now.

I'm trying ath10k, and what I see is that it appears the supplicant
is trying to send the 1/4 message, and it never hits the air.

Firmware has some special handling for this sort of thing..so I'll
go poke around...  If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know.

Thanks,
Ben

On 04/06/2015 10:55 AM, Ben Greear wrote:
> I was missing the CONFIG_IBSS_RSN...it does not seem to be documented in
> the defconfig for supplicant, so I didn't know to add it.
> 
> I am going to try RSN again shortly.
> 
> Also, I tried using my latest 4.0 kernel tree and I am seeing block-acks apparently
> work correctly when using IBSS between two of my ath10k systems on channel 36.
> No significant changes to my firmware from what I last uploaded to the beta
> directory...
> 
> Throughput is still a miserable 13Mbps or so when sending UDP/ipv5 between them,
> but a sniff shows the rate reported as 450Mbps for at least many of the data
> frames (I guess I am still missing patches to enable VHT IBSS currently).
> 
> My tree is here.  It is basically a forward ported and cleaned up version
> of my 3.19 tree, with a few additional patches.  I plan to skip 3.19
> and focus on 4.0 for our own purposes, so my 3.19 tree is basically EOL at
> this point:
> 
> git clone git://dmz2.candelatech.com/linux-4.0.dev.y
> 
> Thanks,
> Ben
> 
> 
> On 03/23/2015 04:24 AM, Sven Eckelmann wrote:
>> On Thursday 19 March 2015 14:40:42 Ben Greear wrote:
>>> In case you have a public kernel tree available somewhere with all your
>>> patches, that might help speed up someone's attempt to reproduce this?
>>
>> I have uploaded the patchset of our test setup at
>>
>>  git://dev.cloudtrax.com/ath10k-ibss-test.git
>>  https://dev.cloudtrax.com/git/ath10k-ibss-test.git
>>
>> As Simon already said, it is not a kernel tree but patches on top of compat-
>> wireless from OpenWrt r44654. If you want to import something into an actual 
>> tree then please create patches and replace the CPTCFG_* strings with 
>> CONFIG_*.
>>
>> Here a small explanation of the branches:
>>
>>  * openwrt_44654: initial import of the source + patches of mac80211
>>    (compat-wireless) package from OpenWrt r44654
>>  * ath3.19: patches of ath10k which were between the compat-wireless version
>>    and Linux 3.19
>>  * candelatech-lf-lf-5.3.1 patches taken from Candelatech's 3.19 tree (minus
>>    some patches which weren't related to the wireless stuff)
>>  * master: the patches which were used for the IBSS test with Ben Greear's
>>    firmware. Most came from Janusz Dziedzic. The rest are just a few small
>>    changes to fix builds, workarounds to fix loading of the firmware and some
>>    required patches for Janusz Dziedzic's IBSS stuff.
>>  * fw-999.999-ibss patch to allow loading of the original firmware with most
>>    of Ben Greear's patches. Was used to verify that the original 999.x
>>    firmware worked fine with block ack sessions + aggregation
>>
>> The only patches not included here are some test patches which weren't part of 
>> the actual "performance" tests. This includes patches used for debugging and 
>> tests to check the IBSS RSN stuff over ath10k (which failed - most likely due 
>> to some firmware "features" regarding encryption which resulted in non-
>> decryptable packets).
>>
>> I think you can use wpa_supplicant 2.4 for VHT. I personally used a patched 
>> version of iw which hardcoded the ibss join VHT parameters. I haven't tested 
>> this yet because I've done the port of the OpenWrt patches on friday evening 
>> and hadn't time to test it with ath10k. But this problem doesn't require VHT 
>> features and thus should be visible with the plain HT setup and no VHT 
>> enabled.
>>
>> Kind regards,
>> 	Sven
>>
>> PS: Not sure if you have finished the test with ath9k IBSS RSN + HT. I was 
>> under the impression that you had problems with it. Beside the stuff I already 
>> wrote in an earlier mail, the only thing which came to my mind was the 
>> wpa_supplicant build setup. IBSS RSN doesn't work with a standard build and 
>> you have to enable CONFIG_IBSS_RSN in the wpa_supplicant config. An example 
>> config which works (with the OpenWrt build system of course) can be found at
>>
>>  https://dev.openwrt.org/browser/trunk/package/network/services/hostapd/files/wpa_supplicant-full.config?rev=38852
>>
>> The wpa_supplicant (runtime) config would be look like this:
>>
>> ap_scan=2
>> network={
>>         scan_ssid=0
>>         ssid="mesh"
>>         key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
>>         mode=1
>>         fixed_freq=1
>>         frequency=5180
>>         mode=1
>>         psk="9f0a965af38f2d0a13b66d8b46ab962c"
>>         proto=RSN
>>         bssid=02:CA:FE:CA:CA:40
>>         # openwrt specific patch for htmode, mcast_rate
>>         htmode=HT40+
>>         mcast_rate=18
>> }
>>
> 
> 

-- 
Ben Greear <greearb at candelatech.com>
Candela Technologies Inc  http://www.candelatech.com