FreeBSD-8.0 802.11n support with ath/mwl

[Jim Pingle]

On 2/28/2010 10:16 PM, Rui Paulo wrote:
> On 1 Mar 2010, at 03:05, Jim Pingle wrote:
> 
>> On 2/28/2010 9:41 PM, Rui Paulo wrote:
>>> On 1 Mar 2010, at 02:26, Jim Pingle wrote:
>>>> Ah, I wasn't aware of wlandebug(8). However, it doesn't seem to operate
>>>> on this mwl(4) card. It sets the value of the sysctl net.wlan.0.debug
>>>> and that doesn't show up on my system. Another system with a ral(4) card
>>>> does have that sysctl. Judging by the information in the wlandebug(8)
>>>> man page it appears as though this may be a side effect of mwl doing
>>>> much of the work in firmware.
>>>
>>> wlandebug takes an -i argument. I seem to recall you created your wlan interface named "mwl_wlan0", so you need to type wlandebug -i mwl_wlan0.
>>
>> I saw that, but that is hardcoded to expect wlan<x> (wlan0, wlan1, etc)
>> for an interface name. Having seen that, I recompiled wlandebug without
>> the hardcoded interface name check and it didn't work either, but it did
>> toss an error for the sysctl it was trying to tweak.
> 
> The whole system was designed for the interfaces to start with "wlan" and be named "wlan<something>".

It does certainly seem to lean that way. Personally I prefer to keep the
hardware name in there, but I wasn't aware that would cause other
issues. Especially when VAPs come into play, I'd rather have, for
example, mwl0_wlan1, mwl0_wlan2, ath0_wlan0, etc, so I can better tie
what goes where. But that's more of a bikeshed of personal preference. :-)

> 
>> That made me look deeper at the code and see it was really just setting
>> the debug sysctl based on flags that wlandebug was aware of. Handy, but
>> the same thing could be done by hand with sysctl and some bitwise math
>> in a pinch, assuming the interface has the right oids. (Which mine
>> doesn't, for some reason...)
> 
> The purpose of wlandebug is to not do any math by hand.

Indeed, You're 110% right on that. I was just trying to work around the
other issues I was seeing to get to the root of the issue, which seems
to be the missing sysctl oid.

I need to run some more tests and straighten my antenna issues out, but
I'll report what I find back to the list in a few days.

Thanks again for the information,
Jim