ath0 weak connectivity

[Sam Leffler]

Dmitry Karasik wrote:
> 	Hi Sam!
> 
>  Sam> I do not understand what "bad connectivity" means.  
> 
> I'm not a native speaker so I've apparently used a wrong term, I apologize
> for the confusion. Instead I should've probably said "low signal strength".
> 
>  Sam> If you provide
>  Sam> information like the mac+phy revs for the card, hal version, and
>  Sam> statistics from programs like athstats then it might be possible to
>  Sam> identify what's wrong.  Otherwise look at turning on debugging at the
>  Sam> net80211 layer with wlandebug.  Both athstats and wlandebug are found
>  Sam> in src/tools/tools (under net80211 and ath respectively).
> 
> Here it is:
> 
> dmesg:
> 
> <Atheros 5212> mem 0xa8400000-0xa840ffff irq 11 at device 2.0 on pci4
> ath0: [GIANT-LOCKED]
> ath0: Ethernet address: 00:14:a4:80:f6:74
> mac 5.9 phy 4.3 radio 3.6
> 
> sysctl -a | grep ath | grep hal:
> 
> hw.ath.hal.version: 0.9.16.16
> hw.ath.hal.dma_brt: 2
> hw.ath.hal.sw_brt: 10
> hw.ath.hal.swba_backoff: 0
> 
> Output after wlandebug +debug scan is too large to be quoted on the list,
> so please take a look here: http://www.karasik.eu.org/misc/ath0.html ,
> probably you can find anything suspicious?
> 

I've lost context about your problem but it appears you're having
trouble associating with "trejago" sometimes.  The failed scan shows
that your rssi was only 6 when you were having problems which is a very
marginal signal so I'm not at all surprised you're having trouble.
You've got strong signal ap's on overlapping channels (5 and 7) which
are likely drowning the signal on your ap.  I don't see anything the
driver could do differently; this seems more an issue of your
environment being very busy.  I vaguely recall you were comparing the
operation of the freebsd to windows.  If so then perhaps the windows
driver was doing better because it switched to XR mode and operating in
XR mode you were able to punch through the noise to get to the ap.
freebsd does not support XR mode.

	Sam