Slow wireless with Atheros AR9285

[leblond]

Hi everyone,

I'm facing some problems with Fedora13 and the AR9285 wifi card... the connection is just too slow, and the wired connection works fine.

I just figured out that a lot of VAIO users (so am I) were in the same situation, and solved their problem by downloading ath9k drivers from linuxwireless.org.

Fine, I did it! That's what I found :

Building and installing

cd /path/to/compat-wireless-2.6.32-rc5
./scripts/driver-select <driver-name>
make
sudo make install

...but make is looking for source files in /usr/src/kernels/2.6.34-7-61.fc13.x86_64/build/ , which doesn't exist! The /usr/src/kernels/ folder is just empty.

I also found something about the fact that Fedora13 didn't came with kernel's source files... So how can I install that driver? (I didn't find the package via yum...)

Thx a lot in advance!

[smr54]

You need to install kernel-devel to fix the error.

No, Fedora and most of the desktop distributions, don't come with source files. Even many more technically oriented distributions leave that to the user to install.

[leblond]

Thanks for your answer, that works... But I still have some problems... and some questions!

Internet is still very slow. In fact I can't see any changes.

What I did :
- make
- sudo make install
- make wlunload

And then reboot to automatically load the new (?) WLAN drivers.

As I couldn't see any change, I wonder if the new drivers were loaded successfully (if F13 loaded the new or the old driver)... how can I see that? (I didn't see anything "interesting" about it with dmesg...)

I then tried to unload and reload the ath9k driver manually with rmmod ath9k and modprobe ath9k. The unload was successful, but I can't load anything... (it found the ath9k module, no wireless devices is visible... and no error messages in the prompt)

Any ideas?

[smr54]

Sigh, not really. Unfortunately, sometimes, Linux lags behind on these, having to reverse engineer most of the drivers. For what it's worth, Fedora has usually struck me as being slower (that is, with wireless speeds) than some other distributions, but I've never really determined why that would be.

[leblond]

Slower than other distros, why not... but THIS is just unacceptable...

I got "time out" messages at almost every pages... need to refresh two or three times before getting something... The transfer rate is made of peaks of maximum 50kbps spaced randomly between one and ten seconds... and on Windows7 I just can't go lower than 200kbps.

I don't think this is normal!

That's why (that and the fact that I'm not the only one in the case) I'm pretty sure the cause is the driver.

Does someone know other drivers for Atheros AR9285 than those distributed by linuxwireless.org? Was my installation procedure all right? Do I made something wrong?

I don't want to believe that there isn't a solution to this problem...

[smr54]

I'm not sure if Madwifi is still putting out drivers or not--they might have stopped, figuring the ath9k and ath5k drivers did the job. You could try them, I guess.

[lpshark]

This should fix your problem:

rmmod ath9k
modprobe ath9k nohwcrypt=1
echo "options ath9k nohwcrypt=1" > /etc/modprobe.d/ath9k.conf