Re: iwlagn is getting very shaky

[Richard Yao]

Dear Norbert,

Would your university by any chance be using wireless network hardware
from Aruba Networks?

A network engineer responsible for maintaining my university's network
emailed me yesterday saying that Aruba Networks has had engineers on
campus working on our wireless problems. They did a firmware update
last Thursday to address some issues, which appears to have resulted
in substantial improvements in the time it takes to connect to the
network, network bandwidth and connection reliability.

It seems that Aruba Networks has its own proprietary firmware, so we
have had to suffer for their duplication of effort. That is not to say
that the iwlagn driver is perfect (e.g. it is missing auto settings
for rts and frag), but this seems like this is a plausible explanation
for why you have issues at your university's wireless equipment while
you have no issues with your wireless router at home.

It is also probably a reason for organizations to insist on having
fully open source software in their hardware, which is something I
explained in an email to the person who decided to purchase hardware
from Aruba Networks last night. Speaking of which, it would be nice if
Intel open sourced iwlwifi-6000-4.ucode. That way improvements in it
would not be solely dependent on our friends at Intel, whose time to
work on these things is likely tied to decisions by Intel's
management.

Yours truly,
Richard Yao

On Wed, Nov 9, 2011 at 12:11 AM, Norbert Preining <preining@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi Emmanuel,
>
> On Di, 08 Nov 2011, Emmanuel Grumbach wrote:
>> I would like to see what happens in terms or power.
>> Please set the power debug flag: modprobe iwlwifi debug=0x100
>
>> It may be worth to disable Link Power save too. I would be glad if you
>> could try this patch (attached and inlined), with the power debug flag
>> set.
>
> With both done, I see things like that:
> [  690.597221] iwlwifi 0000:06:00.0: L1 Enabled; Disabling L0S
> [  690.601979] iwlwifi 0000:06:00.0: Radio type=0x1-0x2-0x0
> [  690.644716] iwlwifi 0000:06:00.0: U iwl_power_sleep_cam_cmd Sleep command for CAM
> [  690.644721] iwlwifi 0000:06:00.0: U iwl_set_power Sending power/sleep command
> [  690.644724] iwlwifi 0000:06:00.0: U iwl_set_power Flags value = 0x00000000
> [  690.644726] iwlwifi 0000:06:00.0: U iwl_set_power Tx timeout = 0
> [  690.644728] iwlwifi 0000:06:00.0: U iwl_set_power Rx timeout = 0
> [  690.644731] iwlwifi 0000:06:00.0: U iwl_set_power Sleep interval vector = { 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 }
> [  690.645649] iwlwifi 0000:06:00.0: U iwl_power_sleep_cam_cmd Sleep command for CAM
>
> Does this help you, or do you need more?
>
> Best wishes
>
> Norbert
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Norbert Preining            preining@{jaist.ac.jp, logic.at, debian.org}
> JAIST, Japan                                 TeX Live & Debian Developer
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