ath: tx-rate stops adapting after a while

[Petar Bogdanovic]

On Fri, Apr 22, 2011 at 05:25:15PM +0800, Adrian Chadd wrote:
> 
> Have you tried this netbsd station against some other AP?

It wasn't really some other AP but the software has changed on both
sides during the past couple of years.. first it was netbsd-4 with
freebsd-6-3, then netbsd-4 with freebsd-7 and finally netbsd-5-1 with
freebsd-8-1.

I remember that freebsd-7 had issues with stations that support some
sort of power management but that went away with freebsd-8..  other
than that, nothing comes to my mind.  Although it's probably important
to mention that the bump from netbsd-4 to netbsd-5-1 replaced the old
binary-hal with the new/open ath-hal.


> What hardware is in the netbsd box?

It's a HP dc7100 with a AR5212 PCI device.


> * somehow the card is incorrectly transmitting OFDM rates (11g) that
>   some things can pick up and some can't, or
> * the netbsd device can't handle OFDM that you're transmitting and
>   only handles CCK rates correctly.

The part that seems a bit weird to me is when [NetBSD] -> [FreeBSD] uses
OFDM but [NetBSD] <- [FreeBSD] stubbornly keeps CCK.  Is there any way
to make this particular layer more verbose, so that one can see why the
driver makes this decision and sticks with it forever?

Right now, I get 3.4MB/s from the FreeBSD AP to the NetBSD station,
which, as far as I remember, is pretty much the upper limit for OFDM54:

$ ifconfig wlan0 list sta
    ADDR               AID CHAN RATE RSSI IDLE  TXSEQ  RXSEQ CAPS FLAG
    00:0b:.....NETBSD    2   10  54M 26.0    0  57455  44432 EPS  AE      RSN
    58:b0:.......OSX1    1   10  48M 38.0   30  44418  36896 EPS  AQEP    RSN WME

$ athstats 1
   input   output altrate   short    long xretry crcerr crypt  phyerr rssi  rate
44862732 28007738    5193       0  730634   2253 360540     0    2948   47   54M
    1663     2481       0       0      71      0      0     0       0   49   54M
    1666     2481       0       0      43      0      1     0       0   48   54M
    1662     2511       0       0      58      0      3     0       0   49   54M
    1691     2526       0       0      42      0      7     0       0   49   54M
    1658     2487       0       0      67      0      0     0       0   47   54M
    1664     2488       0       0      76      0      0     0       0   47   54M
    1668     2508       0       0      54      0      4     0       0   48   54M
    1708     2556       0       0      48      0      0     0       0   47   54M
    1686     2508       0       0      56      0      0     0       0   47   54M
    1653     2462       0       0      88      0      1     0       0   47   54M
    1635     2478       0       0      44      0      1     0       0   46   48M
    1592     2360       0       0      56      0      0     0       0   47   48M
    1621     2404       0       0      32      0      0     0       0   46   54M
    1662     2517       0       0      65      0      0     0       0   46   54M
    1650     2466       0       0      60      0      3     0       0   48   54M
    1653     2480       0       0      90      0      2     0       0   46   54M
    1685     2520       0       0      47      0      0     0       0   48   54M
    1684     2533       0       0      43      0      0     0       0   46   54M
    1682     2513       0       0      66      0      1     0       0   47   54M
    1618     2400       0       0      98      0      0     0       0   48   48M


If it only could stay that way.. :)

		Petar Bogdanovic