[PATCH ath-next 3/3] wifi: ath10k: bring down a station vdev that never came up

[James Prestwood]

Hi Shunsuke,

On 10/15/26 5:17 PM, Shunsuke Nagashima via B4 Relay wrote:
> From: Shunsuke Nagashima <shunsuke at nagashi.ma>
>
> When a connection attempt fails before the station vdev is brought up
> (authentication timeout, SAE failure, association rejected, or an Auth
> burst the AP never acknowledged), mac80211 removes the AP station and
> unassigns the channel context. ath10k deletes the peer and sends
> WMI_VDEV_STOP, but no WMI_VDEV_DOWN: for a station vdev that never came
> up, the down would only come from ath10k_bss_disassoc(), which a failed
> connection attempt never reaches.
>
> On WCN3990 firmware WLAN.HL.2.0.c10-00459 and c10-00236, the Auth frames
> of the next attempt on the same vdev are then not transmitted
> (management tx completion status "discard") until about 20 s after the
> first Auth frame of the failed attempt. In sniffer captures, 241 such
> holds ended 19.94-20.03 s after that frame. Some lasted longer (in one
> overnight run, 29 of 226 had not ended when the cycle ended), for
> example when user space gave up on the attempt during the hold. Probe
> requests still go out. The state belongs to the vdev: an attempt to
> another network (another BSS on the same AP) on the same vdev was held
> too (2 of 2), and re-creating the vdev cleared it (2 of 2). This happens
> on WPA2 networks as well as WPA3. An older firmware build,
> WLAN.HL.2.0-01387, did not hold the frames (0 of 7 reconnects after
> status 30).

This seems similar to an issue we see on the QCA6174's. I don't see a 20 
second delay, but sometimes after an auth/assoc timeout we get a spam of 
failed connections with NL80211_TIMEOUT_UNSPECIFIED. I've mentioned this 
quite some time ago [1]. Do you think it has any relation to whats being 
fixed here?

Thanks,

James

[1] 
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-wireless/441e9883-1efc-498b-ba33-6a4f12443f3b@gmail.com/