Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2012 23:46:21 -0500 From: Qasim Javed <qasimj@gmail.com> To: Adrian Chadd <adrian@freebsd.org> Cc: Ben Greear <greearb@candelatech.com>, freebsd-wireless@freebsd.org, ath9k-devel <ath9k-devel@venema.h4ckr.net>, ath5k-devel@venema.h4ckr.net Subject: Re: [ath5k-devel] [ath9k-devel] Request for help: gui toolkit creation for atheros PHY/MAC statistics Message-ID: <CAJivULqKRockM55A3v2LkMC0ynQ2qWQmXagVrXFDxkOgY6U7FA@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <CAJ-Vmokxq2%2BCHmDgymA5257C=vzN-1P_T3viZ%2BHAr9sAh8QZNw@mail.gmail.com> References: <CAJ-VmomM49oRdHKQFwbEjr7cWc8NeLFvbAgiVrg7%2BFsQifgpCA@mail.gmail.com> <4F6CB06A.6030102@candelatech.com> <CAJ-Vmokxq2%2BCHmDgymA5257C=vzN-1P_T3viZ%2BHAr9sAh8QZNw@mail.gmail.com>
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In addition to driver statistics, I was thinking that a tool like this should provide more insight like how many times the CPU is being interrupted by the Wifi card when it is offered a certain load. I was recently running into an issue with an XR9 card and interestingly I found using the "mpstat" tool that when the offered load goes beyond a certain threshold Mbps, the number of interrupts per second goes down! ath9k has a set of patches (compat wireless with "-pc" at the end of filename before the extension) that dump the TX/RX descriptors which contain rich information regarding the transmission and reception process. I had to write a custom script to process the binary dumps generated by those patches, but if the visualization tool can display that information it would be awesome. Those binary dumps contain almost all the information that could possibly be made available. -Qasim On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 12:25 PM, Adrian Chadd <adrian@freebsd.org> wrote: > On 23 March 2012 10:18, Ben Greear <greearb@candelatech.com> wrote: > >> I wouldn't ask someone to do it and then tell them what language. =A0Jus= t >> suggest >> to them what it needs to do instead. > > I'm sorry if it came across as demanding. It's more that I've looked > at how/where people tend to use these kinds of visualisation tools and > they're not on quad-core i7 laptops. They're on little itty atom > netbooks (or tablets these days, I guess) with comparitively limited > CPU. > > I've also had people suggest C#. Which is fine, but as I'd like this > to be totally open source, I don't want it to depend upon any closed > source C# libraries or any microsoft only runtime bits. Same holds for > any other language. > > The other thing is keeping multiple threads going so your UI doesn't > become unresponsive when you're falling behind doing network/disk IO > or math operations. > > Yes, I've written some GUI stuff, so I have a basic idea of what's > going on. If someone wants to me prove me wrong by demonstrating it > done in python or some other scripting language then fine. > >> The big question for me is: =A0How do you propose to get the info out >> of the driver and up to user-space? > > I'll worry about that later. For FreeBSD, the PHY errors come out via > radiotap, so it'll look like a BPF stream. > >> Just in case it matters...while benchmarking my Linux ethtool patch to >> ath9k, >> I found it took around 35us to make the ethtool ioctl call to get the >> stats. =A0This was on a dual-core Atom system. > > Right, but you can fetch a whole lot of statistics each call. The > ath/HAL ioctl API doesn't return a single stat on each invocation. It > returns a whole swath of them. > > I'm not worried about extracting the data from the various flavours of > wifi stacks we're working with in BSD/Linux. :-) > > > Adrian > _______________________________________________ > ath5k-devel mailing list > ath5k-devel@lists.ath5k.org > https://lists.ath5k.org/mailman/listinfo/ath5k-devel
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