Hello!

I wanted to measure speeds in the softmac driver at all rates, but it
looks like I have found something more interesting in process.

The station is a BCM4312 in Dell Latitude with an antenna embedded into
the laptop.  The AP PCI card with Atheros 5212 running current MadWifi
in 802.11g mode.  Both systems sit on the same desk, about one meter
apart.

I'm using Michael's git repository with Larry's last patch for high
rates.

The speed is measured by iperf 2.0.2 in TCP mode (which is the default).

rate:  iperf reports:

1       928 Kbits/sec
2      1.69 Mbits/sec
5.5    3.92 Mbits/sec
6      4.78 Mbits/sec
9      6.55 Mbits/sec
11     5.97 Mbits/sec
12     8.18 Mbits/sec
18     10.4 Mbits/sec
24     13.0 Mbits/sec
36     15.1 Mbits/sec
48      187 Kbits/sec
54     N/A

Testing at rate 54 caused this to appear on the console about 100 times
in a row:

bcm43xx: ASSERTION FAILED (!ring->suspended)
at: 
/home/proski/src/linux-2.6/drivers/net/wireless/bcm43xx/bcm43xx_dma.c:71:request_slot()

My attempts to test the UDP mode also lead to such messages.  At some
point, following was reported to the console:

bcm43xx: Controller RESET (TX timeout) ...
bcm43xx: IRQ_READY timeout
bcm43xx: core_up for active 802.11 core failed (-19)
bcm43xx: Controller restart failed
bcm43xx: ASSERTION FAILED (!err)
at: /home/proski/src/linux-2.6/drivers/net/wireless/bcm43xx/bcm43xx_main
.c:4057:bcm43xx_net_stop()

After that the system became very slow and I had to reboot it.

Next time I got this during UDP testing:

warning: many lost ticks.
Your time source seems to be instable or some driver is hogging
interupts
rip __do_softirq+0x4d/0xd0
Falling back to HPET

I could check the connection at 48M in USB mode with low 5Mbsp bandwidth
limit, and the packet loss is minimal (10 out of 3211 packets are lost),
so the speed drop must be explained by something else.

There is a clearly a stability problem at the high rates, and perhaps
there is also another problem that limits the throughput.

802.11g modes are faster relative to the rate, e.g. 9 is faster than 11
and 12 is much faster than 11.

36Mbps seems to be the fastest for TCP, although I would probably use
12Mbps to be safe.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin

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