On Wed, Apr 15, 2020 at 06:45:26AM -0700, 0x6d6174 wrote: > Hi everyone. > > I'm running also an APU2 board with an Atheros wlan chipset: > > athn0 at pci5 dev 0 function 0 "Atheros AR9281" rev 0x01: apic 5 int 16 > athn0: AR9280 rev 2 (2T2R), ROM rev 22, address XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX > > I also used an ALIX board with an Atheros wlan chipset (AR9280). > >From OpenBSD 6.0 to 6.6 (-stable) (iirc OpenBSD 5.9 had a slightly better > performance) the wlan performance didn't change for me. > > I use the following test setup: > > PC <--- 100mbps / 1gbps lan ---> ALIX / APU2 board <--- Atheros wlan ---> > Notebook > > # cat /etc/hostname.athn0 > media autoselect mode 11g mediaopt hostap chan 3 > nwid test wpa wpakey wpasecret > wpaprotos wpa2 wpaciphers ccmp wpagroupcipher ccmp powersave > up > > > For simplicity I disable pf and use a bridge interface that uses the lan and > wlan interfaces. Also I always send files with scp from my PC to my notebook > for performance measurements.
Thanks, this is interesting. Can you try your test again without WPA? OpenBSD's athn(4) driver does not offload crypto to hardware yet. I suspect this explains your observations below. > The ALIX board has a wlan throughput of about 2.4 - 3.2 mbps while the APU2 > has a wlan throughput of about 12 - 14 mbps. I noticed by running top -S, > that if I transfer lets say a 1000MB file, then for both boards softnet has > a CPU usage of 100%, thus I suspected that the wlan bandwidth for an Atheros > chip correlates to the CPU usage of softnet (because the APU2 board has a > better CPU it has a higher wlan throughput). If I send a 1000MB file from > one lan interface to another lan interface, then softnet has a CPU usage of > about 20% and the file transfer has a throughput of almost 1gbps. Thus I > suspect the high CPU usage of softnet has something to do with the TX > performance of the atheros driver implementation. > > For a quick test I enabled pf and used traffic sharping to reduce the wlan > troughput: > queue std on "athn0" bandwidth 5M max 10M default > > Now when I transfer a file softnet has a CPU usage of about 70-73% for the > APU2 board (the wlan throughput is about 10 - 11 mbps). > > Also I found an interesting performance report, that pfSense could reach > about 90 mbps with the same hardware that I have (APU2 board with the same > wlan card) see [1], unfortunately I don't have the time to verify it. If > that's true, then the next step I want to do is a diff of the driver > implementations and hopefully understand why pfSense has a much higher > throughput. > > [1] > https://teklager.se/en/knowledge-base/compex-wle200nx-wle600vx-benchmark/ > > best regards, > Mat > > > > -- > Sent from: http://openbsd-archive.7691.n7.nabble.com/openbsd-user-misc-f3.html > >