Thursday, July 30, 2009

The stuck bacon nightmare

Everything was going so well that it could not continue. The driver is giving me stuck beacons that reset the AP and make it unusable. RAA

wifi0: ath_bstuck_tasklet: Stuck beacon; resetting (beacon miss count: 11)


This is a well known issue, though. Some people try to tweak the parameters, others have some voodoo techniques that did not work for me. Now I am patching ath5k to support master mode, but it is not really working.

Now, I am trying the wireless-testing branch of the kernel, with the last drivers available, we'll see...

EDIT: Finally, I tried a bunch of different stuff to make it work, without success. However, I was able to decrease somehow the number of Stuck beacon by doing the following:
  1. Downloading madwfi on the repository (http://madwifi-project.org/svn)
  2. in ath/if_ath_pci.c, we can tweak the PCI latency: pci_write_config_byte(pdev, PCI_LATENCY_TIMER, 0x20);
  3. Do the voodoo stuff as described in here
  4. You can try to switch to ath5k, but master mode was not really successful on my side.

4 comments:

  1. Have you been able to solve the stuck beacon problem?
    I have the same problem with an ATH 5416 chipset.
    I have decided to stay away from madwifi for this reason, I'm using ath9k in Ad-Hoc mode.
    The downside is that for some strange reason I only get around 100 kbps out of it, and to think that I paid 100 USD for this 802.11n card!

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  2. Hi,

    I was able to decrease them, but not totally erase them. Actually, it sounds like it doesn't like my iPhone for some reason (power saving features ?).
    Now the solution I adopted is to use ath_pci for my AP (ie only 1 ap), which is one card and on the other card, I set my client to use ath5k. I'm taking the last sources of ath5k and ath_pci (from git). ath_pci is now OK, even under load, and ath5k works not that bad on the 2.6.30.5.

    I haven't tried the ad-hoc mode. I think that having a small overhead is "normal", but 100kbps is indeed slow. Did you try to take the last release of ath9k ? Does it do the same when you switch to g or b mode / change the rate (n is still a draft...) ?

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  3. when i am cooking i usually add bacon because the taste is really delicious. Actually the bacon for the breakfast is really good i enjoyed a lot. Although the ingredients of the meals be simply if you chose the right ones,the taste will be wonderful.


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