Fedora 13 Beta Various Wi-Fi Driver Issues

martind1111 · #1 14th April 2010, 08:08 PM

I have tested a number of Wi-Fi drivers in Fedora 13 Beta and found issues with some of these drivers. I am reporting them here, in case this information could prove useful to other Fedora 13 Beta users and/or developers. If there are workarounds or known limitations, I would like to hear about it.

I am specifically testing monitoring of Wi-Fi traffic when Wi-Fi interfaces are configured to operate in monitor mode.

For my tests, I must turn off NetworkManager using the following command:

% service NetworkManager stop

I then configure each Wi-Fi interface issuing the following commands:

% iwconfig wlan0 mode monitor
% iwconfig wlan0 channel 1
% ifconfig wlan0 up

I then use tcpdump to monitor traffic, specifically listening for Web traffic from any Wi-Fi client:

tcpdump -i wlan0 tcp port 80

Here are the drivers for which I have found some issues:

ath9k driver: can receive 802.11b/g user data traffic, but only receives some 802.11n user data traffic

rt2860 driver: can't receive any 802.11b/g or 802.11n user data traffic

rt2870 driver: can't receive any 802.11b/g or 802.11n user data traffic

All the devices that use these drivers have their interfaces come up and visible to ifconfig and iwconfig and all interfaces for these devices can be configured without error with the above configuration commands. If I issue tcpdump on these interfaces, I can see beacons and probe requests, but I can't see any user data traffic (like TCP traffic) or only some.

There are no error reported by dmesg when these drivers are loaded.

I can get 802.11b/g and 802.11n user data traffic on other Wi-Fi devices configured in the same way, for instance for any devices using the iwlagn driver.

Martin

**AdamW** · #2 14th April 2010, 08:51 PM

The rt2800 driver is known to not really work at present:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=570869

might be useful to file a bug with your ath9k test, though. File on kernel component, but assign to linville AT redhat DOT com. (Or, alternatively, see if it happens with a vanilla upstream kernel.org kernel, and if so, file at upstream kernel bugzilla). thanks!

martind1111 · #3 15th April 2010, 01:25 PM

Although yesterday I was getting significantly less packets with ath9k than with the iwlagn driver, I retested the ath9k driver today under different network conditions and it is now getting as many packets as iwlagn driver. This was a false alarm.

Thanks for pointing out the problem with rt2860. Hopefully, there will be some resolution to this problem before Fedora 13 hits the shelves. Any chance that Fedora 13 final release will use kernel 2.6.34?

Martin

**AdamW** · #4 15th April 2010, 08:43 PM

"Any chance that Fedora 13 final release will use kernel 2.6.34?"

very unlikely, but it may be updated post-release, and even if not, wireless fixes frequently get backported, since our wireless maintainer is John Linville, who also maintains the upstream wireless tree, so he knows his stuff =)

fredex · #5 18th April 2010, 03:22 AM

does anyone know if the rt2860 driver for F12 (from RPMFusion) will work in f13, since the built-in one doesn't seem to work?

It's tantalizingly close to working,... it sees the AP, at least and appears to be trying to connect but never succeeds...

should I wish to remove the one that comes with f13, can someone advise what package(s) I should uninstall before trying the older one from rpmfusion?

Gracias!

**AdamW** · #6 19th April 2010, 10:13 PM

er, read my replies above? you don't need to use the one from 12. There's already a Fusion repo for 13, which has the driver, and also a blacklist file to make sure it doesn't use the in-kernel driver when you install the Fusion driver.

phkahler · #7 20th April 2010, 12:22 AM

<a href="http://lists.rpmfusion.org/pipermail/rpmfusion-commits/2010-March/008194.html">This page</a> seems to indicate that the blacklisting is done automatically as part of the rt2860 package at rpmfusion. Is that correct?

I've got the same issue with my e1000 - everything seems to work but doesn't connect. It worked fine with F11 and the rt2680 package from rpmfusion.

fredex · #8 20th April 2010, 12:38 AM

Quote:

er, read my replies above? you don't need to use the one from 12. There's already a Fusion repo for 13, which has the driver, and also a blacklist file to make sure it doesn't use the in-kernel driver when you install the Fusion driver.

adamw: yes, I saw your replies above, but they don't seem to address my question.

nevertheless, thanks for the info you gave in reply to mine. I'll check that out.

**AdamW** · #9 20th April 2010, 02:11 AM

oh, sorry, got this confused with a different thread

in any case, yes, there's a working package in the f13 rpmfusion repo, all you need to do is install it and reboot.

fredex · #10 20th April 2010, 02:15 AM

Adamw: trying that as we speak, but it's being uncooperative.

I'm running liveUSB, so I can't upgrade the kernel; the kmods there are all for an OLDER kernel. so I installed the akmod but it doesn't seem to be getting loaded at boot.

Are there better ways to do this?

**AdamW** · #11 20th April 2010, 02:35 AM

you can't do it if you're booting live. Well, all you can do is install the akmod _every_ time you boot, trigger a build of it, manually unload rt2800pci and load rt2860sta. That's the only way you could do it in a live environment.

If you have it set up as a persistent live build you could probably hack something up with a script in your home dir, to do it on boot, you'd have to mess around a bit manually though, the akmod system isn't really set up for that.

fredex · #12 20th April 2010, 02:50 AM

sigh.

Yes, I have "persistence" on the usb drive. I'd have assumed that was close enough for this, but then I don't really know how it all works.

I like to make sure everything works before committing to an upgrade/reinstall, but I guess this is one place where I can't do that.

I don't suppose the kmod would have worked either, then.

Thanks for your assitance!

**AdamW** · #13 20th April 2010, 07:53 PM

"Yes, I have "persistence" on the usb drive. I'd have assumed that was close enough for this, but then I don't really know how it all works."

AIUI persistence only makes your user's home directory persistent, not the rest of the system. I might be wrong, but I don't _think_ I am.

"I don't suppose the kmod would have worked either, then."

Same as the akmod; if you install it then manually unload rt2800pci and load rt2860sta, it ought to work until the next reboot.

Off the top of my head you could stick a built copy of the module in your home dir and slap together a script to do 'modprobe -r rt2800pci; insmod /home/foo/rt2860sta.ko' and set it to be run on login, I guess.