Trouble with ralink rt3070sta driver with 64-bit linux

[QuantumKnot]

I have an Asus USB-N13 dongle and I want to use it in my Fedora 17 x86_64 desktop. I've been trying for a week to get things going efficiently but it seems 64-bit linux is causing me grief.

The rt2800usb built-in driver

Fedora 17 supports the wireless dongle out of the box. But the connection rates are abysmal. On my draft-N network, the connection rates ranges between 20Mbps and 120Mbps (it constantly changes). FTP gives me a pathetic download rate of about 1.1 MB/s while sftp gives 900 kB/s. The ralink driver rt3070sta (which I mention below) connects at 270Mbps and FTP download is 12 MB/s. That is, the built-in driver is very slow.

I've tried turning off power management using

iwconfig wlan0 power off

And also the nohwcrypt=1 option while loading the driver, but none of them make any difference.

Ralink's rt3070sta driver from Asus driver CD

The CD came with RaLink's linux driver. After following the instructions (and making some modifications due to some changed functions names in the 3.x kernels), I managed to get it to compile. After blacklisting the rt2800usb drivers, this driver loads fine and the dongle connects. But two scenarios arose when using this driver:

32-bit linux

Everything is fine on 32-bit linux (Fedora 17). Connection is at full-speed and is relatively stable.

64-bit linux

Everything is fine until you access the network by downloading/uploading. When you go to a browser and surf to any webpage, the whole PC freezes and end up having to do a hard-reset.

Ralink's rt3070sta driver from Ralink's website

I downloaded Ralink's driver (which was a newer version of 2.5). Compiling and installing the driver was fine. It works in 32-bit linux as before. But with 64-bit linux, the following scenarios arose:

Fedora 17's original kernel: 3.3.4-5.fc17.x86_64

The driver works fine here. Connection is at full speed and is very stable.

Fedora 17's latest kernels: 3.6.10-2.fc17.x86_64

There is the same issue. The driver loads, the dongle is recognised, and my draft-N network is connected and authenticated. But whenever I try to access the internet, the whole PC crashes. No crash messages or anything. Gnome 3 just freezes completely. I cannot access any terminal using ctrl-function keys.


Sidenote: If I log into another windows manager (I tried windowmaker), the driver seems to manage to work and connect to the internet fine. I didn't do enough testing but this seems to suggest that GNOME 3 is causing these issues? If I logged into windowmaker, accessed the internet, logged out and back into GNOME, it seems to work for a while. But this is not something I want to do everytime I start my computer.

Ndiswrapper and the Windows XP driver

Next thing I tried was the Windows XP driver running in Ndiswrapper on my 64-bit machine. The driver installed fine and the dongle was recognised. But it froze the entire PC again. Again, a no go.

Ralink's rt3070sta driver with patches

I came across this post from the Ubuntu forums, where the user says that Ralink's developers did not realise about changes in the 64-bit kernels compared with 32-bit.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2092888

So I tried applying the patches to the STA driver source code and tried again. This time, with limited success.

1. Booting with the dongle plugged in, the whole PC crashes when accessing the internet
2. Booting without the dongle plugged in, log into GNOME, then plugin the dongle, it works. I can access the internet and download stuff (though it does freeze the PC eventually after lots of load).


So now I am left with 3 choices:

1. Put up with the very slow speeds of the built-in rt2800usb drivers (only 10% of the best speed)

2. Continue to use the old 3.3.4 kernel with the rt3070sta drivers. But I don't know if this is practical, given that newer versions of Fedora will always use the latest kernels. Something changed between the 3.3 kernel and 3.6 kernel that causes these drivers to freeze the entire PC.

3. Use 32-bit linux with the rt3070sta drivers and latest kernel. But my machine has 8 GB of RAM and no PAE so this is not a viable option.

So I really don't know Can anyone suggest a fix to get the rt3070sta drivers to work on the newer 64-bit kernels?

[jpoland]

I'm seeing similar behavior with an Asus usb-n66 with an ralink rt3573 chip. I have fedora 17 running 3.6.11 and lxde after finally getting the driver built and installed, I can get online for maybe a minute before the machine just freezes with no recovery method or message.

[QuantumKnot]

I'm seeing similar behavior with an Asus usb-n66 with an ralink rt3573 chip. I have fedora 17 running 3.6.11 and lxde after finally getting the driver built and installed, I can get online for maybe a minute before the machine just freezes with no recovery method or message.

Are you running 64-bit?

[jpoland]

Yes, 64bit also. Sorry for not specifying.

[QuantumKnot]

There's no-one at ralink to contact so I guess there will be no fixes for 64-bit linux.

Right now, I'm running the original Fedora 17 kernel (3.3.4-5.fc17.x86_64) in Fedora 18 and the native drivers works great (connects at full speed with no crashes). I guess there shouldn't be any issue running an older kernel with a newer release.


On another note, does anyone know how to contact the ralink driver developers?

[yakky58]

I am having issues with this same device but on 32 Bit Fedora 17. I wonder if you could advise a course of action...

Some details on my system.

Linux Nik-FC17 3.6.11-1.fc17.i686.PAE #1 SMP Mon Dec 17 22:47:14 UTC 2012 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

[root@Nik-FC17 ~]# lsusb
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 05e3:0608 Genesys Logic, Inc. USB-2.0 4-Port HUB
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 148f:3072 Ralink Technology, Corp. RT3072 Wireless Adapter
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 04b3:3108 IBM Corp. 800dpi Optical Mouse w/ Scroll Point
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 04b3:301a IBM Corp.
Bus 001 Device 006: ID 10d5:000d Uni Class Technology Co., Ltd
Bus 001 Device 007: ID 04b3:301b IBM Corp. SK-8815 Keyboard

[root@Nik-FC17 ~]# lsmod | grep -i rt*
rt2800usb 22286 0
rt2x00usb 19201 1 rt2800usb
rt2800lib 55595 1 rt2800usb
rt2x00lib 56174 3 rt2x00usb,rt2800lib,rt2800usb
mac80211 471137 3 rt2x00lib,rt2x00usb,rt2800lib
cfg80211 170721 2 mac80211,rt2x00lib

[root@Nik-FC17 ~]# iwconfig
wlan0 IEEE 802.11bgn ESSID:"BTHub3-NFFH"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.437 GHz Access Point: 00:01:3B:B2:7F:72
Bit Rate=72.2 Mb/s Tx-Power=20 dBm
Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:off
Power Management:on
Link Quality=53/70 Signal level=-57 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:627 Invalid misc:389 Missed beacon:0

I am up to date with the latest kernel so I believe. the lsusb shows I have a rt3070 device attached. This is via a usb stick from SumVision svw322u model. Yet looking at the lsmod the driver load is the rt2800.

I would have expected the rt3070sta driver. Its not blacklisted and I can't find anywhere in yum to download the kmod-rt3070.

The performance is abysmal. I have attached a screen shot of connection manager and it is at best flaky it often drops and seems to work in fits and starts. I have not had Gnome freeze on me but I guess that is because I am using the kernel module and am on 32bit.

Any advice on installing a better driver and whether this should give better throughput and is more stable.

Thanks.

[jpoland]

yakky, you might want to try downloading and building the drivers from ralink
http://www.mediatek.com/_en/07_downl...ows.php?sn=501

then blacklist the rt2800 mod

i found these build instructions the most useful to me https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=149329

On the rt3573 front. I updated to 3.6.11-5 and rebuilt the drivers (again) from the ralink download site (using the two links above) and I've been connected with expected performance for almost two days now. I haven't restarted yet though. I'm going to avoid that for as long as possible.

[yakky58]

I have the rt3072 device not the rt3573 that you mention.

On the mediatek site I can't seem to find the driver for the rt3072 its appears to be listed in with rt2800 which I have loaded.

I did a comparison between by ethernet and wireless by downloading the same file. Ethernet was a steady rate of traffic. Wireless seemed to download blocks stop and the start again.

This I find odd and can't explain. I tried when no one else was attached to the local LAN.

Thanks for the feedback.

[jpoland]

I'm pretty sure that the rt3070 serves as the rt307x driver, so you'd be using the 4th driver listed on the download page. At any rate if you downloaded the driver and built it yourself you're then going to have to rebuild it every time you update your kernel. So you have to consider that also. But, Quantum seemed to indicate that the ralink driver from the site worked fine with the 32-bit kernel.

[QuantumKnot]

This thread seems to confirm my theory that something happened in kernels > 3.3 that causes the ralink sta driver to freeze

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=143667&p=1

FYI, I'm running the 3.3.4 kernel from Fedora 17 in Fedora 18 and the STA driver is working great.