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[20040819]
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More ath adventures - NetBSD >> Linux
I continued playing with the Atheros 54MBit WaveLAN cards and an
LanCom Access point today. Getting things configured in NetBSD was
all easy, simply setting "mediaopt turbo" as listed by "ifconfig -m ath0"
and the channel that the AP was tuned to, and off we went. Almost -
I first had to find out that setting the countrycode to Germany
(by patching CTRY_DEFAULT=276 into the kernel) didn't give any Turbo
modes from the HAL, so we operated the hardware in US frequency bands.
Getting the card to attach to the WaveLAN and tune into the right
frequency, ping the access point in the Atheros Turbo mode was all no
problem. On NetBSD.
On Linux, the MadWiFi driver patched into either a 2.4.x or 2.6.x
kernel didn't work when enabling Turbo mode, giving obscure error
messages that we could decode as wrong parameters to one of the HAL
functions by the ifconfig(!) command. This and all the maze of various
tools like ifconfig, iwconfig, iwpriv together with the lot of
undocumented arguments you had to hand them didn't help to make
setting up Turbo mode on an Atheros card w/ Linux a straight forward
job. Manpages for these tools? You wish! And if available, they're
uncomplete and tell the important bits that you have to put into the
"private" bits of the card.
Today's experience confirmed that if you want a working setup
with little to no fuzz, NetBSD is the right choice! Of course in
an economy that lives from consulting and broken things, Linux
sounds much better as it will create demand for support, consulting
and fixing where things could just work, and people could just
get work done otherwise. Oh well!
Performance measurements with iperf showed 43MBit/s (~5MByte/s) between
a Pentium-133 running Linux connected to the AP via ethernet, and a PIII-800
running NetBSD 2.0_BETA/i386 and a -current kernel from today.
[Tags: ath, linux, netbsd, networking, wlan]
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