This is for Emily..

My friend Emily asks, "is there anywhere to buy a meat pie in New York?"

So I find this place on St Mark's place, east of First Ave.

And apparently it sells meat pies.

And lo and behold, they sell meat pies.

The answer is "yes".

The end is nigh..

Week 1 - stuff seen randomly about

Here's a few random things I saw in the first week here, before I fell stupidly ill.

The Cupcake Lover:

A lot of Converse Shoes:

A nicely washed out photo of Times Square:

And "Radioactive", an Art display in one of the NY Public Library buildings in Mid-town. By the way, the interior of the library buildings I've seen thus far are gorgeous and make me wish I had even an inkling of photographic technique/equipment on me.

Space Invaders!

Who remembers this?

Sleepless in New York..

I had every intent to actually run this as a travel diary for a few weeks, but a few things got in the way.

Well, no, I sort of fib - my normal "meh, diaries!" got in the way. So I decided to play a bit of catch-up - then I fell ill with a cold and respiratory infection which has kept me knocked out for a good week or so.

So, here I go - catchup.

The Flight Over

The flight over was mostly uneventful - except for the complete lack of sleep. Since this was a 30 hour transit from Perth to New York, this made for rather interesting experiences near the end of the trip.

LAX

.. was again, a complete and utter mess. I was sent to the wrong terminal; then after walking from terminal 2 to terminal 7 and back, I find I needed to walk across the road to the Bradley International terminal. I likely should have been much, much more prepared than I was.

JFK

Relatively smooth, for a change.

Subway to Manhattan

I sat next to a Brazilian photographer who told me of his love of asian women. He showed me a few photographs and then proceeded to photograph them secretly without their consent or awareness. I then figured out most of his photos are like that. This creeped me out somewhat.

AR9280/AR9285 support now working

I managed to find and fix the AR9280 and AR9285 support.

Things that needed repairing:

• Updating the AR9280 initvals to the Linux ath9k ones resolved the radio initialisation issues, making everything magically stable!
• The v4k EEPROM code (for the AR9285/AR2427) needed some surgery to reflect what was really going on. In particular, the 8 bit radio bias values in the AR9280 (v14) EEPROM are actually lots of 4 bit values; so the bias values being written to the radio were woefully incorrect. This restored AR9285 stability and made the AR2427 function.
• The AR9280 RF registers need an extra delay before being written to. I guess since the earlier radios are externally connected via single-bit IO (and thus shift registers are involved), the later radios are too. Without this delay, the AR9220 panics on my MIPS board and I would get occasional unexplained resets when I configured an AR9280 on my eeepc. This fix has resolved both those issues.

I have one more fix to integrate for the AR9220 init path so the Ubiquiti SR71-12 and SR71-15 work; then the AR9220 is supported.

The AR2427 baseband seems to hang after a few hours of use, requiring a complete cold (power off) restart. There's some more initialisation code I need to port from ath9k and there's a lot of AR9280/AR9285 calibration code which I need to port over. I hope porting these two over will fix the stability issues that I was seeing. There's also some noise floor calibration fixes from ath9k which I need to integrate into the FreeBSD-HEAD tree.

So, there's been quite a bit of progress! I've had reports from users that the AR9280, AR9285 and AR9220 support is now very stable; much more stable than before.

AR9220 support; why AR9280 is broken

I acquired a pair of shiny AR9220 minipci NICs last week - Ubiquiti SR71-12 and SR71-15. They're supposed to be like AR9280 but on PCI, not PCIe. Unfortunately they didn't work under FreeBSD. After some sleuthing (read: guessing), I stumbled across an ath9k commit which reworked some workaround for some AR9220's, which include the Ubiquiti SR71 versions.

https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/90926/

There's also a bus error when reading a random register which is only referenced in a debug statement. That's a whole other bug to try and deal with.

But now I've verified that with both the AR9280 and the AR9220, the FreeBSD code is definitely tickling the radio wrong. Only one of the two radio chains is even active for the most part, and that chain seems to go deaf quite often, resulting in a baseband hang and chip reset. It also explains why I was getting absolutely shocking 11n performance out of it in my 11n branch.