Saturday night @ ucc: 11n hackery

I'm going to work on the FreeBSD 802.11n support a little more this upcoming Friday night and Saturday at UCC.

My short-short term TODO list:

1. Figure out why crypto isn't working in 11n mode - I've likely just not fully implemented something there;
2. Hopefully I'll have the AR9220 based SR-71 cards by then - so if I do, see whether my HAL works on the AR9280 and AR9220 based NICs;
3. Test the legacy HAL (AR5212 support at least) to make sure I haven't broken that;
4. Make the TX path run-time configurable rather than a compile #ifdef - ie, if the card says it does 11n, use the 11n-aware TX routines;
5. Keep breaking apart sys/dev/ath/if_ath.c into smaller parts to make this whole thing more manageable moving forward.
   

That's all I think I need to finish up before I begin preparation for committing this work to FreeBSD-HEAD.

A productive night at the computer club ..

I spent most of Saturday at the UWA Computer Club, participating in their "Hardware Hacking Night". Whilst others were hacking on power supplies, coke machines and the like, I sat down to try and figure out how 11n TX works.

Which I did, around 11:30pm last night. I still have a long way to go. The AR9160 NIC seems quite happy pumping out packets all the way up to MCS15. I couldn't figure out how to make things work correctly using the 11n RTSCTS protection - if I configure that in the TX registers, no packets are ever sent. That's the next thing on my plate to figure out.

Once I figure that out, I'll worry about the 802.11n "niceities" (short-GI, HT-40 mode to name two) and then see about how to ensure that I'm interoperating (enough!) with legacy non-n devices. There's also hostap and adhoc modes to test.

Now that exams are over ..

My university exams are over for another semester. Remind me why I put myself through this? :-)

So now that they're over, my open source work plate now is rapidly filling up again:

FreeBSD 802.11n:

• 802.11n RX works!
• But now I need to grovel through ath9k and figure out how 802.11n TX works.
• I'm blissfully ignoring handling sending or receiving A-MPDU and A-MSDU frames for now. That can come (much) later once I have stable 802.11n TX/RX in station and hostap mode (which is enough of a challenge for now, thanks.)

Lusca:

• IPv6 client support! I need to finish merging in more stuff to test.
• Thread manager - this is an important one.
• Find my RPM build patches and include them in the subversion tree.

Who needs sleep?