Re: CT ath10k firmware now supports IBSS + RSN

[Sven Eckelmann <sven@open-mesh.com>]

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Hi,

On Friday 10 April 2015 16:32:29 Ben Greear wrote:
> First, thanks to everyone that helped me with questions,
> QCA/Tieto's upstream patches, etc.
> 
> This needs more testing, but it appears to at least mostly work.
> 
> I am using this 4.0 related kernel.  I think only the last 3 patches
> are IBSS specific, but possibly there are others that matter as well.
> 
> http://dmz2.candelatech.com/git/gitweb.cgi?p=linux-4.0.dev.y/.git;a=summary
> 
> Firmware binaries and release notes are here:
> http://www.candelatech.com/downloads/ath10k-fw-beta/
> 
> I'm using a very recent wpa_supplicant..upstream should work I think,
> but I am using this one:
> 
> https://github.com/greearb/hostap-ct/tree/master/hostapd
> 
> supplicant needs to have this enabled, among other things:
> 
> CONFIG_IBSS_RSN=y

thanks for your work on the QCA firmware fork. I have testing your
firmware v14 (firmware-2-ct-full-community.bin;
md5sum 800799459c20c1683138c74b3ba58f25) a little bit on OpenWrt r46413
(+ your patches [1]) with a QCA9880 device and focus on IBSS.

The performance over IBSS looks a lot better than before. So your
aggregation/BlockAck fix seems to work quite well.

But there are also some problems which I've noticed.

 * setting the mcast rate during `iw dev "$ifname" ibss join`
   doesn't seem to work for IBSS mode. The bcast frames are still
   transmitted with 6Mbit/s
   - I've also tried to use the hack
     + echo mcast > /sys/kernel/debug/ieee80211/phy0/ath10k/set_rates
     + iw dev adhoc0 set bitrates legacy-5 18
 * IBSS/RSN isn't working between ath10k<->ath10k, ath9k<->ath10k
   (works well between ath9k<->ath9k)
   - the ath10k device doesn't seem to send its broadcast frames
     after the handshake finished (ath9k already tries to transmit
     bcast frames)
   - also doesn't work with firmware-2-ct-non-commercial-full-14.bin
     and nohwcrypt=1
 * IBSS stops working everytime an AP interface is added to the same
   PHY (it isn't importing whether it is using WPA/WPA2 or configured
   as open AP)
   - tested again with ath9k on the same OpenWrt version and it
     working quite well with 1x IBSS + 2x AP

Were you able to get anything from the above setups working for you?
Maybe there are some workarounds I've missed and that you've
mentioned in other mails. It would be really nice if you could
mention those again :)

Especially interesting would be to know if some of the problems are
already known and just not implemented. Are the not implemented
features planned or currently not the development goal for this
firmware?

Kind regards,
	Sven

[1] https://dev.cloudtrax.com/git/ath10k-ibss-test.git/shortlog/refs/heads/master-20150824

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ap_scan=2
network={
        scan_ssid=0
        ssid="mesh"
        key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
        mode=1
        fixed_freq=1
        frequency=5180
        mode=1
        psk="9f0a965af38f2d0a13b66d8b46ab962c"
        proto=RSN
        bssid=02:CA:FE:CA:CA:40
        mcast_rate=18
        htmode=HT40+
}