Broadcom hybrid_wl driver

[Jarod Wilson]

On Sun, 2008-10-26 at 20:09 +0100, Andreas Thienemann wrote:
> On Sun, 26 Oct 2008, Jarod Wilson wrote:
> 
> > Okay, so back to the Linux side and the hybrid_wl driver... I get no
> > better than ~350KB/s. I presume the driver isn't handling the
> > single-antenna very well or something [...]
> 
> This might be an antenna diversity issue, but I do not think this is 
> likely if you haven't toggled anything in the driver.
> 
> Ping some host on your network, if you're experiencing about 50% packet 
> loss, you're system is using transmit diversity alternating between each 
> antenna.

No packet loss pinging other hosts, or w/other hosts pinging it.

Possibly of note: when pinging out from the host itself, I get fairly
consistent ping times, ranging from sub-millisecond to ~4ms. Pinging
*to* the host, I see wildly varying round-trip times, ranging from
sub-millisecond to 120ms.

> If this is not the case, you're not using diversity at all or just 
> receiver diversity.
> 
> If the connection is miserable in general (snr or signal strength) you
> might have swapped the aux and the main antenna.

Don't think that's the case, since under Mac OS X with the exact same
hardware setup, I get about 12x the throughput.

> The wlan driver usually offers a toggle to switch diversity on and off, 
> usually through some sysctl or /sys interface.

Nothing in /sys that I can see on brief inspection, haven't looked at
the code itself yet.

> The way you're describing your issue though, it sounds as if the driver is 
> just crap...

That seems the most likely to me thus far... :)

ndiswrapper testing Coming Soon...


-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com