problems with madwifi and Atheros AR5418
Hi all,
My new laptop (asus F80L-4P007C) comes with an Atheros AR5418 wifi chipset,
which apparently doesn't work well with madwifi from current Lenny. This
chipset is reported to work with madwifi at:
http://madwifi.org/wiki/Compatibility/Atheros#AtherosAR5418
I have packet loss varying form 0% to 85%, even pinging my local gateway
(which is also the wifi AP). The only other abnormal things I noticed are
the message
wifi0: unknow hardware address type 801
issued (two times) when I ran 'dhclient ath0' (after configuring the card
with iwconfig and bringing it up with ifconfig).
Now, after some time using it, I have:
mpg@roth:~% /sbin/iwconfig ath0
ath0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:"freeboite" Nickname:""
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412 GHz Access Point: 96:8C:04:33:F8:1C
Bit Rate:48 Mb/s Tx-Power:14 dBm Sensitivity=1/1
Retry:off RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality=65/70 Signal level=-31 dBm Noise level=-96 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:47937 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0
I notice that 'Rx invalid nwid' is non-zero, but don't know how to use this
information.
What can I do in order to debug or work around this problem?
For now the options I can see are:
1. Use a more recent madwifi snapshot.
2. Try a 2.6.27 kernel with the new ath9k driver which is supposed to handle
my chipset.
3. Use the win32 driver via ndiswrapper. I don't like this option at all, it
also forces me to re-install everything in 32bits...
Any sensible advice greatly welcome! I include some info which my be useful,
feel free to ask more if I forgot something important.
TIA,
Manuel.
mpg@roth:~% lspci | grep -i wireless
02:00.0 Network controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR5418 802.11abgn
Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01)
mpg@roth:~% lspci -v -s 02:00.0
02:00.0 Network controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR5418 802.11abgn
Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01)
Subsystem: Atheros Communications Inc. Device 3072
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 17
Memory at fdef0000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
Capabilities: <access denied>
Kernel driver in use: ath_pci
Kernel modules: ath_pci, ath5k
roth:~# lsmod G 'ath|wlan'
wlan_wep 9984 1
wlan_scan_sta 17280 1
ath_rate_sample 17024 1
ath_pci 241600 0
wlan 223904 5
wlan_wep,wlan_scan_sta,ath_rate_sample,ath_pci
ath_hal 334480 3 ath_rate_sample,ath_pci
mpg@roth:~% uname -a
Linux roth 2.6.26-1-amd64 #1 SMP Wed Aug 20 12:09:32 UTC 2008 x86_64
GNU/Linux
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