On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 07:51:29AM +0300, Nick Kossifidis wrote: > Since we started the discussion about ath5k and proprietary features i > started a new thread to continue.
> a) X.R.: eXtended Range is a set of proprietary rates and some extra > techniques (various hw tweaks etc) to enable long distance, low > bandwidth links. This feature was never really supported on MadWiFi > (some code for sta mode is there but i don't think anyone used it) and > it's ugly (sends beacons on both 1Mbit and 250Kbit, has some sort of > polling mechanism etc). We should remove XR stuff since we all agree > that we won't support it + even if we want we don't have anything to > work with anyway, 5/10MHz channels should be enough for long distance > links. Just leave XR rate code definitions there for reference (in > case we get any of these from the card -normally we shouldn't but it's > good to know all hw rate code values). Agreed, I see no place for this in neither ath5k (or ath9k for that matter) nor mac80211 (please note that it does require changes that would fit into the mac80211/hostapd areas in our design and neither of those are going to accept these changes even if the driver were.. ;-). > b) OFDM-only g settings for AR5211: AR5211 chips have support for > draft-g (eg. no dynamic CCK/OFDM modulation, only OFDM). I don't know > if we want to support it or not, removing the settings will save us > some space and since it's a draft g implementation i don't think there > are many compatible APs out there. Is there any possibility to support > draft-g on mac80211/cfg80211 ? If not we can just drop it else it's > just some extra data, no big deal. I don't see why we would want to support this at this point. I don't really think there is much use for this and I see no point in making mac80211/cfg80211 more complex for such a corner case. > c) Half/quarter rate channels (10/5MHz width) and turbo mode (double > rate - 40MHz width): Hw can transmit with different channel width > allowing us to operate on half, quarter or double rate (also called > turbo mode). Half and quarter rates are straight forward (just > re-program pll/clock and tweak various phy/rf settings) and most chips > support it, turbo mode on the other hand has some extra parameters and > is supported only on super ag enabled (non-lite) chips > (5212,2414,5414,5424 etc). First we want to use it only on "middle" > channels so that we don't get outside band boundaries when changing > channel width, so we have to limit the available channels we can use > (check out super ag white paper), second we have the opportunity to > support both 20MHz and 40MHz at the same time by using "dynamic turbo" > feature on hw so if we are an AP we can deal both with turbo-enabled > clients and normal clients. I was thinking if we are going to have an > API to set channel width to 10 and 5 MHz for half and quarter rate > channels, we can use the same API to set channel width to 40MHz width > for double rate channels on cards that support it and when we are on > AP mode use the "dynamic turbo" stuff. We don't even have to call it > turbo mode, it's just double rate + some tweaks. I consider this c item to be three different cases: (1) standard-defined 5/10 MHz width channels (2) proprietary channel binding (static 40 MHz turbo) (3) proprietary dynamic 20/40 MHz turbo As far as (1) is concerned, I see some value in supporting it. However, at this point I would probably not enable those channels by default (i.e., I do not want to see them making scan take any more time than it already does). (3) is on a not-going-to-happen list as far as I'm concerned since it requires changes both in mac80211 and hostapd, too, and good luck trying to get this in there.. ;-) (2) is somewhat of a corner case. It would probably be possible to somehow support it as a driver specific hack. While I would personally prefer not to see this, I would probably be fine with it being there as long as these channels are not enabled by default (the same comment as for 5/10 MHz channels and scan). > d) Fast frames: Hw can tx/rx jumbo frames of 3kbytes+ so fast frame > aggregation is a way to make use of that hw feature by sending 2 > frames together (for more infos check out super ag white paper). On > FreeBSD fast frames aggregation is implemented on the protocol stack > (net80211) so that any hw that can tx/rx such jumbo frames can use > fast frame aggregation > (http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/net80211/ieee80211_superg.c?rev=1.7;content-type=text%2Fx-cvsweb-markup;sortby=rev) > but it still maintains atheros's format to be compatible with > commercial Atheros APs. We have talked about this and it seems no one > is willing to support fast frames aggregation so on ath5k we only use > single tx/rx descriptors and there is no related code for handling > multiple descriptors. I don't see how this would get added to mac80211. If someone really wants to spend time on this type of feature, I would suggest adding support for A-MSDU aggregation (the TX side of it) into mac80211 and making it usable with non-HT cases, too. That should result in something quite similar to fast frames, but with a format that is actually defined by IEEE. Sure, this would not be compatible with legacy Super A/G APs, but could be used between two mac80211-based devices. > e) Compression: Hw can do on-chip compression/decompression using > standard Lempel Ziv algorithm per tx queue, MadWiFi implements this > and uses a vendor IE to let others know that it supports this feature > (same IE is used for all capabilities, fast frames, XR etc). I guess > this can also work for other cards by doing compression/decompression > on software since it's a standard algorithm (and i think kernel > already has code for it) but it's way outside cfg80211/mac80211's > scope. I think we can just use NL80211_CMD_TESTMODE to enable/disable > this on all data queues and skip the IE stuff (user will have to > enable it on both sides to make it work). There is no related code on > ath5k for compression/decompression at the moment. Even compression needs some negotiation support (i.e., mac80211/hostapd are actually in scope) and there are some ugly corner cases showing up issues with it.. I don't see much point in supporting this either. -- Jouni Malinen PGP id EFC895FA _______________________________________________ ath5k-devel mailing list ath5k-devel@lists.ath5k.org https://lists.ath5k.org/mailman/listinfo/ath5k-devel
