Atheros AR9462 not working properly

[Daniel Cervus]

Hello,

My laptop is using Atheros AR9462 (Dell 1901) wireless card, which is supposed to be supported by the ath driver, but in FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE-p6, it doesn’t work correctly.

Although it supports 802.11n, only 802.11g network was detected.
bsdconfig displays as “unknown network interface type”, but during installation, it was correctly recognized.
Occasionally there’s “ath0: ath_edma_recv_tasklet: sc_inreset_cnt > 0; skipping” displayed.
I can connect to network in 802.11g mode, but not steadily, occasionally “Failed to add supported operating classes IE” was displayed.

Is that normal?

[Adrian Chadd]

hi!

(a) it'll say 802.11g but then the channel should say HT/20 or HT/40.
what's the actual output of ifconfig wlan0 ?
(b) yeah, that's a bsdconfig bug :-)
(c) that's fine, it's likely some crazy stuff like needing to do some
packet IO during a scan; it's printed like that in case things are
also hanging
(d) that's fine, I gotta figure out what's up with that but it's harmless


-a

Post by Daniel Cervus
Hello,
My laptop is using Atheros AR9462 (Dell 1901) wireless card, which is supposed to be supported by the ath driver, but in FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE-p6, it doesn’t work correctly.
Although it supports 802.11n, only 802.11g network was detected.
bsdconfig displays as “unknown network interface type”, but during installation, it was correctly recognized.
Occasionally there’s “ath0: ath_edma_recv_tasklet: sc_inreset_cnt > 0; skipping” displayed.
I can connect to network in 802.11g mode, but not steadily, occasionally “Failed to add supported operating classes IE” was displayed.
Is that normal?
_______________________________________________
https://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-wireless

[Daniel Cervus]

Post by Adrian Chadd
hi!
(a) it'll say 802.11g but then the channel should say HT/20 or HT/40.
what's the actual output of ifconfig wlan0 ?
(b) yeah, that's a bsdconfig bug :-)
(c) that's fine, it's likely some crazy stuff like needing to do some
packet IO during a scan; it's printed like that in case things are
also hanging
(d) that's fine, I gotta figure out what's up with that but it's harmless
-a

(a) When unconnected:
wlan0: flags=8c43<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,OACTIVE,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
ether ***
inet6 ***%wlan0 prefixlen 64 scopeif 0x3
groups: wlan
ssid "" channel 3 (2422 MHz 11g)
regdomain ROW country CN indoor ecm authmode OPEN privacy OFF
txpower 30 bmiss 7 scanvalid 60 protmode CTS wme burst
parent interface: ath0
media: IEEE 802.11 Wireless Ethernet autoselect (autoselect)
status: no carrier
nd6 options=23<PERFORMNUD,ACCEPT_RTADV,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>

Connected to my iPhone hotspot:
wlan0:
flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
ether ***
inet6 ***%wlan0 prefixlen 64 scopeif 0x3
inet6 *** prefixlen 64 autoconf
inet 172.20.10.11 netmask 0xfffffff0 broadcast 172.20.10.15
groups: wlan
ssid "My iPhone" channel 6 (2437 Mhz 11g ht/20) bssid ***
regdomain ROW country CN indoor ecm authmode WAP2/802.11i privacy ON
deftxkey UNDEF AES-CCM 2:128-bit txpower 30 bmiss 7 scanvalid 60
protmode CTS ampdulimit 64k ampdudensity 8 shortgi -uapsd wme burst
roaming MANUAL
parent interface: ath0
media: IEEE 802.11 Wireless Ethernet MCS mode 11ng
status: associated
nd6 options=23<PERFORMNUD,ACCEPT_RTADV,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>

I see that, thank you. And another interesting thing is when I use “ifconfig wlan0 scan”, all the networks’ rate showing are 54M, is that another bug?

(b) What’s more, I cannot select “network options” and scan Wi-Fis in it.
Has anyone reported this bug? Do I need to do that?

(c)&(d) That’s pretty annoying, can I suppress these messages?

(e) A new bug? If the SSID contains Unicode characters, it seems I’m unable to connect as well. Ifconfig wlan0 scan only outputs an incomplete hexadecimal value of it.

[Adrian Chadd]

hi!

Post by Daniel Cervus
wlan0: flags=8c43<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,OACTIVE,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
ether ***
inet6 ***%wlan0 prefixlen 64 scopeif 0x3
groups: wlan
ssid "" channel 3 (2422 MHz 11g)
regdomain ROW country CN indoor ecm authmode OPEN privacy OFF
txpower 30 bmiss 7 scanvalid 60 protmode CTS wme burst
parent interface: ath0
media: IEEE 802.11 Wireless Ethernet autoselect (autoselect)
status: no carrier
nd6 options=23<PERFORMNUD,ACCEPT_RTADV,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>
flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
ether ***
inet6 ***%wlan0 prefixlen 64 scopeif 0x3
inet6 *** prefixlen 64 autoconf
inet 172.20.10.11 netmask 0xfffffff0 broadcast 172.20.10.15
groups: wlan
ssid "My iPhone" channel 6 (2437 Mhz 11g ht/20) bssid ***
regdomain ROW country CN indoor ecm authmode WAP2/802.11i privacy ON
deftxkey UNDEF AES-CCM 2:128-bit txpower 30 bmiss 7 scanvalid 60
protmode CTS ampdulimit 64k ampdudensity 8 shortgi -uapsd wme burst
roaming MANUAL
parent interface: ath0
media: IEEE 802.11 Wireless Ethernet MCS mode 11ng
status: associated
nd6 options=23<PERFORMNUD,ACCEPT_RTADV,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>
I see that, thank you. And another interesting thing is when I use “ifconfig wlan0 scan”, all the networks’ rate showing are 54M, is that another bug?

That's just a side effect of wifi and how net80211 tools were built.

The 54MB is the non-11n rate announce. Now, for greenfield 11n, I
think it'll show something faster, but for normal 802.11 deployments
that support 11abg as well as 11n, 11ac, etc - 54M is how fast the
11abg side of things can run.

If you read the manpage and look at the flags, you'll see "11n" is a
flag (H) in the flags section.

Post by Daniel Cervus
(b) What’s more, I cannot select “network options” and scan Wi-Fis in it.
Has anyone reported this bug? Do I need to do that?

In bsdconfig? That's not cool. Yeah, please file a bug.

Post by Daniel Cervus
(c)&(d) That’s pretty annoying, can I suppress these messages?

I'm going to eventually push some logging changes to stop it showing
up on the kernel console. So just stay tuned.

Post by Daniel Cervus
(e) A new bug? If the SSID contains Unicode characters, it seems I’m unable to connect as well. Ifconfig wlan0 scan only outputs an incomplete hexadecimal value of it.

I think that's just a shortcoming from ifconfig, but wpa_supplicant
should support unicode? Hm. I'm not sure, I've never used unicode AP
characters here!



-adrian