On 7 April 2013 13:40, Andrew Connell <andrew.conn...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi, > I'm interested in modifying the firmware so as to increase the number of > stations that can be connected when an ath9k device is in AP mode. > Currently, after 7 devices are connected, whenever another device tries to > connect, hostapd shows "Could not add STA to kernel driver". I understand > this is a firmware issue and I've been told that I can modify the firmware > to get around this -- is this the case? I can't imagine why there'd be such > a low limit without good reason. > I managed to build and install the 1.4 firmware but it suffers from the same > issue, if someone could give me a pointer on where to find the appropriate > part so I can increase the limit (if it's indeed possible), it'd be much > appreciated.
Well, the firmware is open so you can go and take a look at exactly what kind of state is being kept in the firmware. Right now the state includes rate control and TX retransmission, so it's quite plausible you'll hit memory exhaustion limits there. Felix (and I, increasingly) are thinking of evolving the firmware to not keep that kind of state in the firmware and leave it up to the host. That way we can run much more than 7 stations in AP mode as all the firmware will be doing is the acting as a data pipe. I think we may still want to do retransmission in firmware to get around some latency issues, but only very simple retransmission. Anything else gets complicated when you want to do any kind of fair queuing.) But, yes, you have the source. I encourage people to go look at it and document what they find. adrian _______________________________________________ ath9k-devel mailing list ath9k-devel@lists.ath9k.org https://lists.ath9k.org/mailman/listinfo/ath9k-devel
