Re: RESOLVED! was: NetGear MA401, firmware 1.3.6, cannot use hostap mode, massive transmission errors, difficulty speaking to the rest of the network

From: Brian Capouch (brianc_at_palaver.net)
Date: 2002-09-13 06:56:36 UTC


Eric Johanson wrote:> Of all of the card/driver combos, I find the orinoco_cs to work the best
> out of all of them.
>
> I've never had a single problem taking to any AP, iBSS or BSS mode.
>
> Using kernel 2.4.18, patched (monitor mode patches from snax/airsnort)
> orinoco_cs .11b
>
> However, it sucks with prism cards.
>
> Could you provide more detail on what type of problems you've had?
>

 From a userland perspective, dropouts in pings, long latencies, and stilted throughput.

Many kernel errors logged about Tx interrupts being dropped.

I would think perhaps I'm misconfiguring things wrt IRQ assigments, but it has happened on so many different machines, with and without so many other combinations of cards, and it is so consistent for me, that I really can't believe *all* of them are wrong.

It is an erratic thing, though, and usually occurs only after the card has associated and been in use for a bit.

It usually winds up getting me as "I rebuild the pcmcia tools, which overwrites my default /etc/pcmcia/config file, and the driver is then loaded on bootup. Then sometime later I notice my throughput shot to hell, and I remember that I'm using that driver."

The wvlan_cs driver works PERFECTLY in each of these cases, with all other factors held constant, which further fuels my certainty that it's not a mis-configured interrupt issue.

I've had this as well in desktop machines, both with ISA and PCI adapter cards. And the switch to the wvlan_cs driver always fixes it there, too.

If they ever remove that "obsolete" driver I'm really going to be hurting.

B.

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