Which Firmware to use for STA (999.x crashes...)

Fri May 1 09:57:10 PDT 2015

On 05/01/2015 09:43 AM, richard mayers wrote:
> I meant kernel. In the web page it says that:

CT firmware should work fine with upstream kernels.  The extra benefits
you might get from our modified kernels should be feature related and not performance
related.  I'd be interested if you found differences in throughput using
various kernels...

My 4.0 tree is buggy in at least some configurations..I'm working on bisecting it now,
but I would stick with our 3.17 tree for now if you are using our kernels.

> To take advantage of all of the CT firmware features, please consider
> using one of these kernels. Both kernels are rebased fairly often to
> keep all CT patches at the top of the git changelog.
> 
> For this measurements I am actually using old laptops. I started the
> experiments with a board running OpenWrt, but the results were quite
> bad. So I thought that was due to the CPU and I moved to laptops,
> however I tried all the lenovo laptops I had at my disposition and
> none of them were listing the network card (a lot of people had the
> same problem with ). Finally, I found that the cards were recognized
> in old Dell laptops, they have a dual core 1.66Ghz, Do you think is
> that enough ?  I will also try to modify the sockets buffers.
> 
> I read a paper were they report throughputs of 800-900 Mbit/s using
> the same network card and running the tests in normal environments.

We have seen 950Mbps on one golden Netlink AP, but cannot reliably
reproduce that good throughput.

Your CPU is probably sufficient...but you might check 'top'
to make sure your traffic generator is not at 100% CPU.

Thanks,
Ben

> 
> Thanks !
> 
> Richard
> 
> 2015-05-01 18:30 GMT+02:00 Ben Greear <greearb at candelatech.com>:
>> On 05/01/2015 09:21 AM, richard mayers wrote:
>>> Sorry for not providing details, I wanted to focus more in the
>>> firmware crash. Therefore you recommend me to use the Candela
>>> firmware. If I just want to run throughput, delay, and fairness
>>> measurements do you think is okay not using the kernel provided by
>>> them ?.
>>
>>
>> You mean firmware not provided by them?
>>
>> I'd be happy to see comparisons between my CT firmware and others,
>> but if official firmware just crashes, then I guess you cannot do
>> that.
>>
>> If you can crash CT firmware, let me know...I have a chance of
>> fixing it.  I have no chance of fixing upstream firmware, but
>> maybe you can get some help from QCA folks.
>>
>> With UDP, we often see > 700Mbps throughput, but most of these
>> types of tests we do in isolation chambers cabled up.
>>
>> Over-the-air is probably more like 600Mbps in a clean environment.
>>
>> You typically have to increase kernel socket buffers to get best
>> throughput, and CPU on the host starts to matter at those speeds
>> as well.
>>
>> Antenna matter a lot...just play around with it.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Ben
>>
>>>
>>> Anyway, for the throughput I do as follows:
>>>
>>> Tool : Iperf. (iperf -c server_ip -b 1000M -i 1)
>>> Protocol : UDP
>>> Channel : Over the air, with three antennas.
>>> AP: hostapd, channel 149, 80Mhz. With the same kernel, driver,
>>> firmware, and NIC than the Station.
>>> STA: I get the maximum throughput with MCS = 5/6, when I go further to
>>> 7-9 the throughput drops dramatically to 50Mbit/s.
>>>
>>> I think the antennas should be separated each other 12 cm, I am wrong
>>> ? can this have a high impact on the throughput ?
>>>
>>> Richard
>>>
>>> 2015-05-01 17:52 GMT+02:00 Ben Greear <greearb at candelatech.com>:
>>>> Candela firmware should work just fine for stations.
>>>>
>>>> And, when reporting throughput, you should also provide details
>>>> about how you tested (tool, protocol, over-the-air or not, AP
>>>> involved, etc).
>>>>
>>>> Thanks,
>>>> Ben
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On 05/01/2015 08:38 AM, richard mayers wrote:
>>>>> Hi everyone!
>>>>>
>>>>> I need to do some 802.11ac measurements. For that I am using the
>>>>> Compex wle900vx.
>>>>>
>>>>> I had a set up in which everything was working quite well, however I
>>>>> had a maximum throughput of 380Mbits/s ( with all the debug options
>>>>> enabled )
>>>>>
>>>>> In this first set up I had been using ubuntu 14.04 LTS, kernel version
>>>>> 3.16, for the driver I used the latest stable backport (3.19) and
>>>>> finally as a firmware the commercial firmware from Candela Tech
>>>>> (latest version) in both the AP and STA.
>>>>>
>>>>> However, I read in the wiki that the latest firmware version for AP is
>>>>> the 10.2.4.48, and the Stations should use 999.999.0.63. For this
>>>>> second set up I changed almost everything:
>>>>>
>>>>> - Upgraded kernel to 4.0.1
>>>>> - Backported drivers from the git Modinfo output -> (backported from
>>>>> Linux (v3.2-rc1-243765-ga2ff7c6) using backports
>>>>> backports-20150424-2-g982)
>>>>>
>>>>> AP : 10.2.4.48 firmware
>>>>> STA : Following the wiki : 999.999.0.63
>>>>>
>>>>> During boot the firmware is loaded without any problem:
>>>>>
>>>>> ath10k_pci 0000:0c:00.0: qca988x hw2.0 (0x4100016c, 0x043202ff) fw
>>>>> 999.999.0.636 api 2 htt 2.1 wmi 1 cal otp max_sta 16
>>>>>
>>>>> However when I associate with the AP, the firmware crashes.
>>>>>
>>>>> [11831.954992] ath10k_pci 0000:0c:00.0: firmware crashed! (uuid n/a)
>>>>> [11831.955031] ath10k_pci 0000:0c:00.0: qca988x hw2.0 (0x4100016c,
>>>>> 0x043202ff) fw 999.999.0.636 api 2 htt 2.1 wmi 1 cal otp max_sta 16
>>>>> [11831.955039] ath10k_pci 0000:0c:00.0: debug 0 debugfs 0 tracing 0
>>>>> dfs 0 testmode 0
>>>>> [11831.957059] ath10k_pci 0000:0c:00.0: firmware register dump:
>>>>> [11831.957068] ath10k_pci 0000:0c:00.0: [00]: 0x4100016C 0x00000000
>>>>> 0x009C4521 0x00000000
>>>>> [11831.957076] ath10k_pci 0000:0c:00.0: [04]: 0x009C4521 0x00060530
>>>>> 0x00000019 0x00955A00
>>>>> [11831.957084] ath10k_pci 0000:0c:00.0: [08]: 0x00306862 0x00000000
>>>>> 0x0040CC94 0x00000020
>>>>> [11831.957091] ath10k_pci 0000:0c:00.0: [12]: 0x00000000 0x00000000
>>>>> 0x00958360 0x0095836B
>>>>> [11831.957098] ath10k_pci 0000:0c:00.0: [16]: 0x80991091 0x0040AD94
>>>>> 0x0043155C 0x00000000
>>>>> [11831.957106] ath10k_pci 0000:0c:00.0: [20]: 0x0000FFFF 0x00000000
>>>>> 0x0043155C 0x00000000
>>>>> [11831.957114] ath10k_pci 0000:0c:00.0: [24]: 0x809A0978 0x0040AD94
>>>>> 0x00439484 0xC1A18834
>>>>> [11831.957121] ath10k_pci 0000:0c:00.0: [28]: 0x809AD1A2 0x0040ADE4
>>>>> 0x00439484 0x0043FB1C
>>>>> [11831.957129] ath10k_pci 0000:0c:00.0: [32]: 0x809B35A3 0x0000001A
>>>>> 0x00440A50 0x0000000E
>>>>> [11831.957136] ath10k_pci 0000:0c:00.0: [36]: 0x00000000 0x00000000
>>>>> 0x00000000 0x00000000
>>>>> [11831.957143] ath10k_pci 0000:0c:00.0: [40]: 0x00000000 0x00000000
>>>>> 0x00000000 0x00000094
>>>>> [11831.957151] ath10k_pci 0000:0c:00.0: [44]: 0x00439DC8 0x00000000
>>>>> 0x00000000 0x00400000
>>>>> [11831.957158] ath10k_pci 0000:0c:00.0: [48]: 0x809AE0B4 0x0040AE04
>>>>> 0x00400000 0x0043FB1C
>>>>> [11831.957166] ath10k_pci 0000:0c:00.0: [52]: 0x00000001 0x00000000
>>>>> 0x00423410 0x00400000
>>>>> [11831.957173] ath10k_pci 0000:0c:00.0: [56]: 0x809AE17E 0x0040AE44
>>>>> 0x0040FE6C 0x0040D310
>>>>> [11832.046908] ath10k_pci 0000:0c:00.0: failed to synchronize monitor
>>>>> vdev 1 stop: -108
>>>>> [11832.046915] ath10k_pci 0000:0c:00.0: failed to stop monitor vdev: -108
>>>>>
>>>>>  I have seen that in the past a lot of people had problems with this
>>>>> firmware but since years have passed maybe the way of solving have
>>>>> evolved.
>>>>>
>>>>> Apart from that I also got the 00:03:07:12:34:56 MAC address issue.
>>>>>
>>>>> Any ideas guys? Should I use the candelatech firmware for the stations ?
>>>>> Richard
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> ath10k mailing list
>>>>> ath10k at lists.infradead.org
>>>>> http://lists.infradead.org/mailman/listinfo/ath10k
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Ben Greear <greearb at candelatech.com>
>>>> Candela Technologies Inc  http://www.candelatech.com
>>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Ben Greear <greearb at candelatech.com>
>> Candela Technologies Inc  http://www.candelatech.com
>>
> 

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