Re: [PATCH 2/2] wifi: ath9k: Reset chip on potential deaf state

[Simon Wunderlich <sw@simonwunderlich.de>]

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On Tuesday, November 5, 2024 2:02:31 PM CET Toke Høiland-Jørgensen wrote:
> Relying on the debugfs counters for this seems like an odd roundabout
> way of going about things. Why not just record the last time an RX
> interrupt was received directly in the interrupt handler code, and then
> have the watchdog check if that time was too far in the past?
> 
> Recording both TX and RX times may even help distinguish between 'deaf'
> and 'idle' (cf the comment above): if we transmitted something, but got
> no RX, that's a good indication of the deaf state; but if nothing
> happened in either direction, it's probably just the network that's
> idle. I think? 
> 
> -Toke

Forgot to comment here: On the AR934x hardware we worked on in the very 
beginning, we actually still had a few interrupts coming even if the hardware 
was 'deaf'. This why we did not implement it with a timer, but counted the 
number of interrupts for a given time and compared it to a minimum expected 
ratio, as done in this patch.

I understand your argument for the TX part, but I think it actually breaks the 
AP mode and prevents the recovery: if we can't hear any clients, they will not 
use the Internet and the AP has not much to TX either. So an already deaf AP 
has nothing to transmit just as an idle AP, but for a different reason ...

Cheers,
       Simon

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