Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2015 10:03:08 +0600 From: Alexey Dokuchaev <danfe@nsu.ru> To: wireless@freebsd.org Subject: Dual-band AR5414 card test-run on stable/8 and head Message-ID: <20150121040308.GA49520@regency.nsu.ru>
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Hi there, Recently I've purchased few assorted ARxxxx-based wireless cards. Original plan was to replace 2200BG Intel of mine (it's not really stable and driver does not support frame injection), but this goal had failed: my new awesome (and quite expensive) industry-grade 9220-based dual-band card was too tall for my laptop's miniPCI bay and had MMCX antenna plugs rather than U.FL. :( So I was only left to play with AR5414 2.4GHz/5GHz (per specs from the shop) card; looks like it is Askey WLL4070-D50. After doing "ifconfig ath0" (on stable/8, this loads ath.ko): ath0: <Atheros 5413> mem 0xb0110000-0xb011ffff irq 17 at device 8.0 on pci6 ath0: [ITHREAD] ath0: AR5413 mac 10.5 RF5413 phy 6.1 .. and "kldload ath_pci" on head (r277422, ifconfig(8) alone does not DTRT): ath0: <Atheros 5413> mem 0xb0110000-0xb011ffff irq 17 at device 8.0 on pci6 ath0: AR5413 mac 10.5 RF5413 phy 6.1 ath0: 2GHz radio: 0x0000; 5GHz radio: 0x0063 Per `pciconf -lv`, it's class=0x020000 card=0x132910cf chip=0x001b168c rev=0x01 hdr=0x00 network ethernet, by Atheros Communications Inc. Device string differs between stable/8 (AR5006 family 802.11abg Wireless NIC) and head (AR5413/AR5414 Wireless Network Adapter [AR5006X(S) 802.11abg]). Now, here's my quest. I first tried to use it under stable/8 (which is my every-day working system). Apparently it could connect to the access point and obtained DHCP lease, but I could not ping even the gateway (and thus anything outside). I've also noticed two things: 1). WiFi LED is always on, immediately once I press the power button (before FreeBSD gets to boot). With 2200BG, it was actually correctly reflecting network activity. Any chance it can be fixed to work with Atheros card(s)? This applies to both stable/8 and head. The LED goes off only when laptop is switched off or put to suspend (S3). 2). I have "WiFi radio on/off" button on the keyboard (Fn-F2) which seems to work with both cards, Intel and Askey. There is a difference, however: with iwi(4), there are "radio turned off/on" messages in dmesg, but nothing alike with ath(4). Since LED stays always on, it is impossible to easily tell at which state is the card at any given moment. On -CURRENT, modulo that I had to "kldload ath_pci" instead of just saying "ifconfig ath0", it works quite well. I could connect to the office WiFi (at 2.4GHz, probably because the access point doesn't support or offer 5GHz radio), and finally I could ssh wirelessly and has the same responsiveness as on copper (previously, with 2200BG, it was pretty laggy, bad enough for typing anything become a real PITA). Too bad I cannot stay on -CURRENT for too long due to broken suspend/resume cycle. TL;DR: the card works on head, but not on stable/8; any revisions I should take a look at, test, and ask for MFC if all goes well? What about always- on LED, can it be controlled? Does ath(4) expects anything from e.g. ACPI to be able to do so? I will probably continue to buy more of ath(4) cards to see how well they behave. :-) ./danfe
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