Kernel updates

During baby naps I actually did some Rio Karma work this week. First, I found and fixed a recent bug in usb storage that makes the Karma not work at all in 2.6.35. Then I finally set up my omfs git tree on kernel.org, with a few patches I wrote almost two years ago, plus a recently found memory leak. I’ll try to get Linus to pull it in 2.6.36. Then, I made a new release of omfsprogs rewritten to use libomfs from the FUSE version of omfs (I also did this work two years ago). Now all is right in the Karma world again; time to ignore it for another 6 months.

Then, on to ath5k. One nagging issue that the driver has always had is that there’s pretty much a total lack of synchronization among the myriad threads. There’s an ad-hoc spin lock here and there, but for example the reset procedure, which reloads hundreds of registers, can be called concurrently with itself and other driver ops, and can be invoked while trying to transmit and receive packets. So one idea we’ve been hashing out on the ML is to serialize reset with a mutex by putting it into process context via a workqueue, and disabling tasklets while it runs. I hacked that together and it’s now available in wireless-testing. Hopefully this will fix some of those weird DMA-into-freed-skb errors that can potentially be caused by untimely modification of descriptor pointers.

Finally: tracing. For the last year or so, Linux has grown its own NIH answer to DTrace in the form of ftrace and tracepoints. The wireless subsystem already has a few tracepoints here and there, and I really like it better than debug printks because they have smaller overhead in the compiled-but-not-enabled case (a branch compared to an out-of-line function call). You can pick and choose individual tracepoints to sample, or combine them with a general tracing facility such as ftrace. I have some patches baking to add various tracepoints to ath5k [1, 2, 3].

One really neat idea that I appropriated from Johannes Berg’s work on iwlwifi is to store entire packets in the tracing ring buffer. Then you can have a trace-cmd plugin to write these out as tcpdump pcap files. This is really nice: you get a packet dump that works with your existing debug infrastructure, plus you have the tracing information so you know what the code is trying to do, at whatever granularity you chose when setting up the trace. Hopefully, this will be a good one-stop debug gathering tool, not just for developers, but for users, as well.

Ath5k AP Mode

People seem to keep asking about this, despite there being a quality page on kernel.org on how to run an AP with any mac80211 driver. So for what it’s worth, here’s how my setup works. Note if you are seeing flakiness with certain clients, e.g. it works fine with a computer but not with your cell phone, it is likely there is some bug with the power saving handling. I’m currently working on a few such issues, so it may be fixed soon enough.

To get started, you need the following:

  • some sort of network uplink, like a wired ethernet port
  • a kernel with ap mode support for ath5k (2.6.31+) and netfilter (for NAT)
  • dnsmasq
  • hostapd

You have two basic options for interfacing the wireless network with your wired network. One is by using a bridge directly to the wired network. Another is to use NAT so the wireless network is on its own subnet. The former is more typical of an embedded device, but I prefer the latter on my home LAN, so that’s what I’ll describe.

Turn off any wireless daemon (such as NetworkManager) while you experiment with hostapd to ensure that nothing else has the device open.

The hostapd.conf is large but self-explanatory. One can get away with a rather small config file if using the defaults. This example sets up an AP on wlan0 with the SSID “hostapd_ath5k”. It has a wlan-facing IP address 192.168.10.1, it’s on channel 11, supports 802.11g, and has the WPA pre-shared key “my_password”. I have also set up EAP, it works but requires making a lot of certs and such, so Google is your friend here.

hostapd.conf:

interface=wlan0
driver=nl80211
ssid=hostapd_ath5k
hw_mode=g
channel=11
auth_algs=3
own_ip_addr=192.168.10.1
wpa=1
wpa_passphrase=my_password
wpa_key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
wpa_pairwise=CCMP

For DHCP and DNS forwarding, I use dnsmasq. This couldn’t be easier. Just put something like the following in /etc/dnsmasq.conf:

   dhcp-range=192.168.10.50,192.168.10.150,12h

This will hand out addresses in the 192.168.10.X subnet. Then I use a small script to enable IP masquerading before launching hostapd (note, it will flush all iptables rules, which may not be what you want, so use with caution).

run.sh:

#!/bin/sh

DEV=wlan0
GW_DEV=eth0

# set IPs
ifconfig $DEV down
ifconfig $DEV up
ifconfig $DEV 192.168.10.1

# setup ip masq
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
iptables -F
iptables -t nat -F
iptables -A FORWARD -i $DEV -j ACCEPT
iptables -A FORWARD -o $DEV -j ACCEPT
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o $GW_DEV -j MASQUERADE

./hostapd hostapd.conf

Running the script will launch hostapd, and if all goes well, you’ll see it show up in scans from other computers.

If anything goes wrong, make sure:

  • you’ve started dnsmasq
  • you have a valid backhaul connection
  • you aren’t using power save mode on client (iwconfig wlan0 power off — see previous comment about PS bugs)
  • you haven’t found a bug

wl1251_sdio merged

The SDIO patches for TI 1251 (Android wifi chipset) are finally merged into wireless-testing, so they should be a lot easier to hack on now. That means the driver should make it into 2.6.32, though at a rather experimental stage. I did fix some crashes on ifup/ifdown since last posting, but there’s always more work to do. Current todo list includes better behavior for non-polling controllers (make the irq have a top-half), tracking down a device hang on reinitialization, pushing the msm_wifi.ko module, and on and on.

But I need to spend spare cycles on ath5k in the near term. John Linville recently remarked that he was sick of seeing bug reports that say “it works fine in madwifi,” and frankly, I agree. There’s little excuse for having a sub-standard driver given that we have had two fully open HALs for almost a year. Of course, that can be laid at my feet as much as anyone’s, so my plan is to install madwifi side-by-side with ath5k and do a lot of performance testing to see where we stand. ANI is the big missing feature; it will be useful to see how madwifi performs with and without it.

In other nerdy news, yesterday I scored a copy of Kernighan and Pike’s The Practice of Programming at the local used book store for $3. I’ve read the first five chapters so far. While I’ve been at this long enough to have already learned the book’s best practices (some the hard way), I really wish it was required reading at many of the places I’ve worked. You could do away with a lot of stupid coding standards documents by instead saying “read tpop, oh and please no studly caps.”

ath5k performance history

I was curious how well ath5k has been improving since its release, so I hacked up a little script to associate and do five minute iperf runs from /etc/rc.local. Looks pretty good so far (w-t is wireless-testing plus 5 or 6 extra patches I have brewing). The script is pretty kludgy, but may form the basis for some automatic build/regression testing in the future.
ath5k iperf chart

Kernel 2.6.30

Linux kernel 2.6.30 is out, featuring the best mainline support for ath5k yet. I recommend if you do use wireless with 2.6.30 (or .29), that you also grab this patch which fixes a nasty memory corruption issue. That one haunted me for months but it was a great feeling to finally nail it down. Of course the fix turned out to be quite simple. It should be hitting stable in short order.

What to look for in 2.6.31:

  • AP mode (finally!)
  • better transmission power settings
  • enhanced support for regulatory domains
  • rfkill support

There are still a couple of bugs in AP mode and rfkill, but hopefully they’ll get ironed out in the next two weeks or so. It’s too early to make predictions for 2.6.32, but improved power saving is a possibility, and of course lots of bug fixes. I also hope to set up some automated testing now that I have more than one piece of hardware (thanks Luis!) and will be interested in seeing performance statistics since ath5k was introduced.

Next week, Ange and I will be heading off to Berlin, where I’ll be attending the Linux Wireless Mini-summit at FUDCon for a couple of days, and after that we’ll be staying a few days for vacation. I’m sure to return with a head full of ideas about 802.11 networking, and a belly full of beer and sausage.

2.6.30 preview

Now that Linux 2.6.29 just went out the door, here’s what I have prepared for 2.6.30 in the wireless arena. Of note, mac80211 now has suspend/resume support so a lot of nasty hacks in the drivers can go away. Most of the rest is just bug fixes, some of them for panics and soft lockups.

The work I’m excited about this week is scheduled for 2.6.31 — we extracted a bunch of ath9k regulatory infrastructure into a common module that all of the Atheros drivers (including the new ar9170) will use. This is the first step in getting a lot of that common code into a library. Hooray! Also Nick has some great improvements to the RF stuff queued up, so the driver is behaving much better.

Bob Copeland (29):
      ath5k: support LEDs on Acer Aspire One netbook
      ath5k: fix off-by-one in gpio checks
      mac80211: document return codes from ops callbacks
      ath5k: fix bf->skb==NULL panic in ath5k_tasklet_rx
      mac80211: add suspend/resume callbacks
      ath5k: remove stop/start calls from within suspend/resume
      ath5k: remove unused led_off parameter
      ath5k: use short preamble when possible
      ath5k: honor the RTS/CTS bits
      mac80211: change workqueue back to non-freezeable
      mac80211: flush workqueue a second time in suspend()
      ath9k: remove write-only current_rd_inuse
      ath9k: save a few calls to ath9k_regd_get_eepromRD
      ath9k: convert isWwrSKU macro into C code
      ath9k: remove ath9k_regd_get_rd()
      ath9k: remove prototype for ath9k_regd_get_current_country
      ath9k: move common regulatory code out of if() branches
      ath5k: don't mask off interrupt bits
      ath5k: use spin_lock_irqsave for beacon lock
      ath5k: move beacon processing to a tasklet
      ath5k: compute rts/cts duration after computing full pktlen
      ath9k: fix 802.11g conformance test limit typo
      ath5k: extract LED code into a separate file
      ath5k: use a table for LED parameters
      ath5k: update LED table with reported devices
      ath5k: disable MIB interrupts
      ath5k: remove dummy PCI "retry timeout" fix
      ath5k: warn and correct rate for unknown hw rate indexes
      ath5k: properly drop packets from ops->tx