For some NICs (notably the rtl8192cu that I'm working on) the
firmware rate adaptation requires beacon processing to be enabled.
Instead of making assumptions in the if_rtwn beacon routines (and
honestly all of that should be in the HAL too), create a HAL method
for enabling/disabling beacon processing specifically in STA mode.
Since this isn't necessarily required for all NICs (notably the RTL8188E
NICs, where some will do firmware rate control and some will require
driver rate control), only enable it for the RTL8192CU and RT8192EU.
The RTL8188E and RTL8812/RTL8821 just have no-op routines for now.
Locally tested:
* RTL8192CU, STA mode
Differential Revision: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D48066
Reviewed by: bz
This is an attempt to reverse engineer what the actual transmit power
calculations are doing and apply net80211 limits on them. It doesn't
look as simple as just applying the check at the end - there are plenty
of places where offsets are calculated between different PHY modes and
1 / 2 antenna MCS transmit rates.
There are also some places where the offset being added is negative,
so handle the potential underflow so when things hit 0, they don't
just wrap and cause the maximum transmit power into the registers.
This is being done to aide in power/performance debugging - if there
are issues with the transmit power being wrongly calculated and are too
high, the output waveform will be distorted and it will effect performance.
Being able to drop the transmit power by a few dB here and there can
quickly identify if this is happening (because suddenly higher MCS
rates / OFDM rates suddenly work better!)
I've tested each NIC through the transmit power values from 0 dBm
to 30dBm via ifconfig (and they're all capped far before that,
normally around 20-25dBm) and they're not underflowing.
Locally tested:
* RTL8192CU, STA
* RTL8192EU, STA
* RTL8188EU, STA
Differential Revision: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D47987
Reviewed by: bz, imp
* Refactor out the TX power register register dump - it's done in
a couple places and it makes sense to refactor it.
* Condense the output into a few lines per transmit chain. It's
very long with the 8 and 16 MCS rates, and it made it difficult
to eyeball what's going on when tweaking TX power.
Differential Revision: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D47986
Reviewed by: bz, imp
The RTL8188/RTL8192/RTL8821/RTL8812 NICs all seem happy to have
their transmit power changed at runtime - and it does seem to do
what's expected - the transmit power level does change.
So, add the API call here, even though it's all currently no-ops.
A follow-up commit will land changes for the chipsets to both
limit transmit power to the configured / regulatory limit AND
allow reconfiguration at runtime.
Differential Revision: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D47979
Reviewed by: bz, imp
* expand the ridx field all the way through 4x4 11n (MCS0..MCS31)
* and then expand it through VHT 4x4 (MCS0..9 for each stream)
* add accessor macros to check if the rate is HT, VHT
* use accessor macros to check if the rate is HT rather than
comparing it against OFDM54 or RIDX_HT_MCS(0); the values
aobve HT MCS will be VHT, and we don't want to trigger on those!
* add a couple of appropriate TODO VHT bits in the TX path
Locally tested:
* RTL8192CU, STA mode
* RTL8188EU, STA mode
* RTL8821AU, STA mode
* RTL8192EU, STA mode
Differential Revision: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D47896
Some chipsets (such as the RTL8188E) have firmware which supports
a second kind of TX report - instead of a per-packet TX report,
it can generate a per-MACID summary of packet success/failure counters.
This would be helpful for those chips to cut back on the USB traffic
to get rate control feedback for the driver based rate control we're
currently using.
This is a no-op; it just gets the pieces in place for future work.
Differential Revision: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D47894
Both rwlwifi in Linux and rtwn in OpenBSD restore this register,
and the existing code was saving the value and not using it.
Reported by: -Wunused-but-set-variable
Reviewed by: imp
Obtained from: OpenBSD
Differential Revision: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D34838
