On Sunday 05 August 2007 01:26:52 Larry Finger wrote:
> The port of bcm43xx from softmac to mac80211 is available for testing.
> There are two patch sets that can be downloaded from
> ftp://lwfinger.dynalias.org/patches and be applied to kernel 2.6.23-rc1 or
> -rc2, the mainstream git tree (Linus's), and Linville's wireless-2.6 git
> tree.
>
> The two files are ftp://lwfinger.dynalias.org/patches/SSB_Final, which
> installs the SSB driver, and
> ftp://lwfinger.dynalias.org/patches/port_to_mac80211, which has the changes
> for the bcm43xx driver. The resulting driver will use V3 firmware.
>
> These patches are similar to the 4301 test driver that was circulated
> earlier. The major change is that the earlier version was trying to set the
> power too low. Once that was fixed, performance has become quite good, as
> shown below. I'm still working on the power setup, which may help the
> BCM4306.
>
> Transker rates (xmit/recv in Mbs), obtained by using an Iperf server on my
> LAN
>
> Bit Rate BCM4311 BCM4318 BCM4306
> set (Mbs)
> 1 1.17/8.66 1.22/9.39 1.22/3.73
> 2 1.96/11.2 1.98/12.5 1.90/4.98
> 5.5 4.15/17.7 4.19/17.7 3.98/5.09
> 6 4.86/17.3 4.86/19.9 2.66/4.94
> 9 6.58/17.7 6.56/19.9 3.26/5.01
> 11 6.57/14.2 6.54/18.5 6.07/5.20
> 18 10.7/19.6 10.7/20.2 4.74/5.05
> 24 12.6/19.6 12.8/20.0 4.12/5.34
> 36 16.2/20.1 15.9/20.1 4.76/4.90
> 48 17.9/20.0 15.1/19.6 3.70/4.18
> 54 19.0/19.8 15.1/20.0 1.83/2.64
>
> These results look rather good for the later models - my BCM4306 has a PHY
> rev of 1. On this version, much more is required in the PHY setup, and we
> clearly have more work for that device.
>
> Please let me know of any problems in applying the patches, or any oops's
> that occur.
>
> Larry
I have tried these patches on 2.6.23-rc2 and find perceived performance to be
about the same as for the bcm4301 mac80211 driver. I use this script to
stresstest the connection:
iperf -c 192.168.0.1 -t 3600 > /dev/null &
watch --interval .1 "dmesg|grep phy[0-9]|tail -n1 \
&& ifconfig eth1 \
&& iwconfig eth1 2>&1"
iwconfig:
eth1 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:"NETGEAR"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.442 GHz Access Point: 00:0F:B5:3D:4B:E2
Bit Rate=2 Mb/s
Retry min limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr=2346 B
Encryption key:off
Link Quality=65/100 Signal level=-60 dBm Noise level=-70 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0
dmesg|grep "TX power"
[ 755.816434] bcm43xx-phy0 debug: Current TX power output: 10.25 dBm, Desired
TX power output: 10.0 dBm
[ 763.339286] bcm43xx-phy0 debug: Current TX power output: 9.0 dBm, Desired
TX power output: 10.0 dBm
[ 770.840137] bcm43xx-phy0 debug: Current TX power output: 10.50 dBm, Desired
TX power output: 10.0 dBm
[ 778.343126] bcm43xx-phy0 debug: Current TX power output: 9.0 dBm, Desired
TX power output: 10.0 dBm
[ 785.842109] bcm43xx-phy0 debug: Current TX power output: 10.50 dBm, Desired
TX power output: 10.0 dBm
[ 793.347213] bcm43xx-phy0 debug: Current TX power output: 10.25 dBm, Desired
TX power output: 10.0 dBm
Isn't Desired TX power supposed to adapt so that higher bitrates are possible,
with Bit Rate going lower if that is not enough to keep a good connection?
When next to AP I get 54Mbps when connection is idle or has low utilisation,
but when running iperf the Bit rate instantly changes to 1Mbps. While running
iperf it jumps between 1, 2, 5.5 and 11Mbps. When manually setting it to 54M
it will work with good thoughput. I think it fails at 11M and starts over
from 1 again.
Performance next to AP (iperf -c 192.168.0.1):
1M 721K
2M 1.64M
5.5M 3.72M
6M 5.66M
9M 7.62M
11M ---
12M 9.28M
18M 11.9M
24M 14.0M
36M 17.2M
48M 18.5M
54M 18.4M
auto 451K
When 10 meters away from AP anything higher than 5.5 is unusable, often 5.5M
too.
11M mode is unusable at all distances, 12M works fine. This probably breaks
rate scaling for me.
"rmmod bcm43xx" when kde is running hangs rmmod and prevents a clean shutdown.
I tried to find which program causes this while using bcm4301 driver, but so
far no luck. System shuts down fine if I don't try to rmmod first. rmmod
works fine from runlevel 3 aside from this message when inserting module
again:
"net eth1: device_rename: sysfs_create_symlink failed (-17)"
Nitpicking:
When changing bitrate manually it will not show up with iwconfig before any
traffic has occured.
Sometimes iwconfig link quality shows values in the whole 0-255 range.
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