[arch-general] Last couple of updates Knocked my Wireless -- OUT (atheros/madwifi/ath_pci)

[David C. Rankin]

On Tuesday 22 September 2009 02:56:18 am Vincent Van Houtte wrote:
> >        The network came right up on the next boot, but all isn't good.
> > The network
> > performance is about 1/20th of what it normally is.
> 
> I had the same experience with the ath9k-driver since kernel 2.6.29
> (ath9k-driver in kernel .28 worked perfectly and in .29 ndiswrapper helped
> me out). Several other people have asked questions about this (ath5k and
> ath9k) in the forum. Shortly after kernel .30 came out, my laptop died on
>  me and my new laptop has another chipset, so I couldn't test kernel .31. I
>  never tested the madwifi-drivers.
> 
> My symptoms were: very weak signal strength, breaking connections and
> connection speeds that made me cry for ndiswrapper... I never got around to
> finding the culprit, so filing a bugreport was impossible.
> 
> Vincent
> 

Vincent,

	Thank you for the information. At least I know I'm not going crazy... It 
looks like I will have to downgrade the kernel to test the older madwifi 
package:

08:30 alchemy:~/archlinux/config/wireless/madwifi-good> sudo pacman -U 
madwifi-*
loading package data...
checking dependencies...
error: failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies)
:: madwifi: requires kernel26<2.6.31

	There is a huge problem with this kernel/madwifi combination. To test the 
speed, I pulled a 25M test file from the server which usually takes well less 
than 10 seconds. Now, with the new kernel/madwifi driver:

08:25 alchemy:~/archlinux/config/wireless> rsync -uav --progress 
archangel:~/dsj.wav .
receiving incremental file list
dsj.wav
    23578844 100%  201.77kB/s    0:01:54 (xfer#1, to-check=0/1)

sent 30 bytes  received 23581816 bytes  204171.83 bytes/sec
total size is 23578844  speedup is 1.00

	Now it takes OVER 114 seconds. This is a 10-20 fold increase in time. I used 
to regularly transfer 500-800M files across the wireless connection. Now, that 
is out of the question.

	I admit, I'm not very good at troubleshooting wireless driver issues. How 
would I start trying to figure out what is causing the poor wireless 
performance. I do have a spare laptop drive with SuSE on it that I can pop in 
to compare things if that would help. I just need to know what I would need to 
start looking at. Which files/logs may hold the clue?

	Thanks.

-- 
David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.
Rankin Law Firm, PLLC
510 Ochiltree Street
Nacogdoches, Texas 75961
Telephone: (936) 715-9333
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