Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Hey, look, it's lots of atheros NICs in one laptop

So after many months of evenings and a whole lot of work internally to get the AR9380 HAL release vetted by legal, I bring you: a single, unified ath(4) and ath_hal(4) driver which works on all chipsets.

Now, the only chipsets I can fit _in_ this laptop:

[100309] ath0: mem 0xebf00000-0xebf0ffff irq 17 at device 0.0 on pci3
ath0: AR9280 mac 128.2 RF5133 phy 13.0
[100309] ath1: mem 0xedf00000-0xedf1ffff irq 18 at device 0.0 on pci4
ath1: AR9380 mac 448.3 RF5110 phy 0.0
[100309] ath2: mem 0xe4310000-0xe431ffff irq 16 at device 0.0 on cardbus0
ath2: AR5212 mac 5.9 RF5112 phy 4.3

.. that's an AR9280, AR5212 and AR9380 in the same laptop.

And, that's a 3x3 AR9380:

static_rix (-1) ratemask 0xffffffff
[ 250] cur rate 20 MCS since switch: packets 1 ticks 2647581
[ 250] last sample (6  Mb) cur sample (0 ) packets sent 9
[ 250] packets since sample 9 sample tt 0
[1600] cur rate 22 MCS since switch: packets 15 ticks 2647530

[1600] last sample (21 MCS) cur sample (0 ) packets sent 6049
[1600] packets since sample 0 sample tt 532
   TX Rate     TXTOTAL:TXOK       EWMA          T/   F     avg last xmit

[ 6  Mb: 250]        4:4        (100.0%)        4/   0   760uS 2640242
[20 MCS: 250]        9:9        (100.0%)        9/   0   440uS 2647581
[20 MCS:1600]      969:969      (100.0%)       57/   0   572uS 2647445
[21 MCS:1600]     1517:1517     (100.0%)       74/   0   613uS 2647557
[22 MCS:1600]     1990:1990     (100.0%)       92/   0   529uS 2647557
[23 MCS:1600]    73986:73462    ( 99.5%)     5661/   0   755uS 2647538

Now, I'm sure the AR5210 will work with an AR9280 and an AR9380 in the same laptop - it's just that the hardware form factor won't let me fit them all at the same time.

4 comments:

  1. hi andrian,
    Can i question something not related to this topic ? i'm sorry if is wrong place.
    A wireless card in AP mode can work in more channels ?. Something like: ifconfig wlan0 channel 3, 8, 11.

    Thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Nope. It can only be in one channel at a time in AP mode.

    AP mode has no way to tell the stations that it itself is going "away" for a bit. It only listens to power save status updates from clients.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi Adrian,
    First of all thank you very much for valubale information of this blog.
    I have a question. Does the ath9k supports A-MPDU transmission and block Ack in adhoc mode or not?

    ReplyDelete
  4. hi! please email the ath9k development list.

    ReplyDelete