Re: Recent fragility with if_wi, 802.11 adhoc/wep, and Tiger

Michal Mertl wrote:
> Sam Leffler wrote:
> 
>>Michal Mertl wrote:
>>
>>>Robert Watson wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>I fairly regularly use 802.11 adhoc with WEP to communicate between my 
>>>>6.x/7.x FreeBSD notebook using if_wi, and my Apple PowerBook running Mac 
>>>>OS X Tiger.  A few days ago, when I updated from a June to a July HEAD 
>>>>revision, this became quite "fragile".  Specifically, I often find that 
>>>>the Mac can't send to the FreeBSD box (ARP fails, etc), and that sometimes 
>>>>it will give an error when I ask it to re-connect to the ad hoc network. 
>>>>I find that if I ifconfig down/up if_wi, and likewise turn off and on the 
>>>>wireless on the PowerBook, it seems to recover.  I've not had a chance to 
>>>>really try and diagnose this at all -- i.e., does tcpdump show packets on 
>>>>either end, 802.11 state machine, etc.  I was wondering if anyone else has 
>>>>seen this problem, though.
>>>
>>>
>>>Yes, I'm also experiencing similar problems. The problems seem to happen
>>>also with different wireless cards and without wep. They were reported
>>>by Johann Hugo on 14th in an email titled "ath hostap - clients
>>>assosiated, but no comms" too.
>>>
>>>Another problem with WiFi which Johann reported long time ago is that
>>>bridging on atheros (only?) AP works really bad. I get very varying ping
>>>response (50 - inf. ms). Sometimes it seems the packets get queued
>>>somewhere - after some time I receive several replies at once.
>>
>>I routinely bridge ath cards (a wide variety) with bge using bridge and 
>>see no problems.  I get ~36 Mb/s in 11a w/ superg features and ~28 Mb/s 
>>w/ basic stuff (what you find in RELENG_6).  ping times are what you'd 
>>expect (<1ms).
> 
> 
> I'm sorry, I was too brief in the description of the problem. It's the
> bridging on the card which works slow.
> 
> I run an ath card in hostap mode and several wireless clients connect to
> it and are on the same IP network. The ping from one client to another
> is slow yet both ping the AP fine. I think that in this situation the
> bridging is done by ath (in HAL?) and configured by 'ifconfig apbridge'.

The bridging is done in the net80211 layer, not "in the card".  I will 
test, thank you.

	Sam