Until net80211 grows a specific ticks type that matches the system,
manually use the same type as the kernel/net80211 'ticks' type
(signed int.)
Tested:
* AR9380, STA mode
My initial rate control code was .. suboptimal. I wanted to at least get MCS
rates sent, but it didn't do anywhere near enough to handle low signal level links
or remotely keep accurate statistics.
So, 8 years later, here's what I should've done back then.
* Firstly, I wasn't at all tracking packet sizes other than the two buckets
(250 and 1600 bytes.) So, extend it to include 4096, 8192, 16384, 32768 and
65536. I may go add 2048 at some point if I find it's useful.
This is important for a few reasons. First, when forming A-MPDU or AMSDU
aggregates the frame sizes are larger, and thus the TX time calculation
is woefully, increasingly wrong. Secondly, the behaviour of 802.11 channels
isn't some fixed thing, both due to channel conditions and radios themselves.
Notably, there was some observations done a few years ago on 11n chipsets
which noticed longer aggregates showed an increase in failed A-MPDU sub-frame
reception as you got further along in the transmit time. It could be due to
a variety of things - transmitter linearity, channel conditions changing,
frequency/phase drift, etc - but the observation was to potentially form
shorter aggregates to improve BER.
* .. and then modify the ath TX path to report the length of the aggregate sent,
so as the statistics kept would line up with the correct bucket.
* Then on the rate control look-up side - i was also only using the first frame
length for an A-MPDU rate control lookup which isn't good enough here.
So, add a new method that walks the TID software queue for that node to
find out what the likely length of data available is. It isn't ALL of the
data in the queue because we'll only ever send enough data to fit inside the
block-ack window, so limit how many bytes we return to roughly what ath_tx_form_aggr()
would do.
* .. and cache that in the first ath_buf in the aggregate so it and the eventual
AMPDU length can be returned to the rate control code.
* THEN, modify the rate control code to look at them both when deciding which bucket
to attribute the sent frame on. I'm erring on the side of caution and using the
size bucket that the lookup is based on.
Ok, so now the rate lookups and statistics are "more correct". However, MCS rates
are not the same as 11abg rates in that they're not a monotonically incrementing
set of faster rates and you can't assume that just because a given MCS rate fails,
the next higher one wouldn't work better or be a lower average tx time.
So, I had to do a bunch of surgery to the best rate and sample rate math.
This is the bit that's a WIP.
* First, simplify the statistics updates (update_stats()) to do a single pass on
all rates.
* Next, make sure that each rate average tx time is updated based on /its/ failure/success.
Eg if you sent a frame with { MCS15, MCS12, MCS8 } and MCS8 succeeded, MCS15 and MCS
12 would have their average tx time updated for /their/ part of the transmission,
not the whole transmission.
* Next, EWMA wasn't being fully calculated based on the /failures/ in each of the
rate attempts. So, if MCS15, MCS12 failed above but MCS8 didn't, then ensure
that the statistics noted that /all/ subframes failed at those rates, rather than
the eventual set of transmitted/sent frames. This ensures the EWMA /and/ average
TX time are updated correctly.
* When picking a sample rate and initial rate, probe rates aroud the current MCS
but limit it to MCS0..7 /for all spatial streams/, rather than doing crazy things
like hitting MCS7 and then probing MCS8 - MCS8 is basically MCS0 but two spatial
streams. It's a /lot/ slower than MCS7. Also, the reverse is true - if we're at
MCS8 then don't probe MCS7 as part of it, it's not likely to succeed.
* Fix bugs in pick_best_rate() where I was /immediately/ choosing the highest MCS
rate if there weren't any frames yet transmitted. I was defaulting to 25% EWMA and
.. then each comparison would accept the higher rate. Just skip those; sampling
will fill in the details.
So, this seems to work a lot better. It's not perfect; I'm still seeing a lot of
instability around higher MCS rates because there are bursts of loss/retransmissions
that aren't /too/ bad. But i'll keep iterating over this and tidying up my hacks.
Ok, so why this still something I'm poking at? rather than porting minstrel_ht?
ath_rate_sample tries to minimise airtime, not maximise throughput. I have
extended it with an EWMA based on sub-frame success/failures - high MCS rates
that have partially successful receptions still show super short average frame
times, but a /lot/ of retransmits have to happen for that to work.
So for MCS rates I also track this EWMA and ensure that the rates I'm choosing
don't have super crappy packet failures. I don't mind not getting lower
peak throughput versus minstrel_ht; instead I want to see if I can make "minimise
airtime" work well.
Tested:
* AR9380, STA mode
* AR9344, STA mode
* AR9580, STA/AP mode
Mainly focus on files that use BSD 2-Clause license, however the tool I
was using misidentified many licenses so this was mostly a manual - error
prone - task.
The Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX) group provides a specification
to make it easier for automated tools to detect and summarize well known
opensource licenses. We are gradually adopting the specification, noting
that the tags are considered only advisory and do not, in any way,
superceed or replace the license texts.
The pre-11n calculations include SIFS, but the 11n ones don't.
The reason is that (mostly) the 11n hardware is doing the SIFS calculation
for us but the pre-11n hardware isn't. This means that we're over-shooting
the times in the duration field for non-11n frames on 11n hardware, which
is OK, if not a little inefficient.
Now, this is all fine for what the hardware needs for doing duration math
for ACK, RTS/CTS, frame length, etc, but it isn't useful for doing PHY
duration calculations. Ie, given a frame to TX and its timestamp, what
would the end of the actual transmission time be; and similar for an
RX timestamp and figuring out its original length.
So, this adds a new field to the duration routines which requests
SIFS or no SIFS to be included. All the callers currently will call
it requesting SIFS, so this /should/ be a glorious no-op. I'm however
planning some future work around airtime fairness and positioning which
requires these routines to have SIFS be optional.
Notably though, the 11n version doesn't do any SIFS addition at the moment.
I'll go and tweak and verify all of the packet durations before I go and
flip that part on.
Tested:
* AR9330, STA mode
* AR9330, AP mode
* AR9380, STA mode
connectivity interact with the net80211 stack.
Historical background: originally wireless devices created an interface,
just like Ethernet devices do. Name of an interface matched the name of
the driver that created. Later, wlan(4) layer was introduced, and the
wlanX interfaces become the actual interface, leaving original ones as
"a parent interface" of wlanX. Kernelwise, the KPI between net80211 layer
and a driver became a mix of methods that pass a pointer to struct ifnet
as identifier and methods that pass pointer to struct ieee80211com. From
user point of view, the parent interface just hangs on in the ifconfig
list, and user can't do anything useful with it.
Now, the struct ifnet goes away. The struct ieee80211com is the only
KPI between a device driver and net80211. Details:
- The struct ieee80211com is embedded into drivers softc.
- Packets are sent via new ic_transmit method, which is very much like
the previous if_transmit.
- Bringing parent up/down is done via new ic_parent method, which notifies
driver about any changes: number of wlan(4) interfaces, number of them
in promisc or allmulti state.
- Device specific ioctls (if any) are received on new ic_ioctl method.
- Packets/errors accounting are done by the stack. In certain cases, when
driver experiences errors and can not attribute them to any specific
interface, driver updates ic_oerrors or ic_ierrors counters.
Details on interface configuration with new world order:
- A sequence of commands needed to bring up wireless DOESN"T change.
- /etc/rc.conf parameters DON'T change.
- List of devices that can be used to create wlan(4) interfaces is
now provided by net.wlan.devices sysctl.
Most drivers in this change were converted by me, except of wpi(4),
that was done by Andriy Voskoboinyk. Big thanks to Kevin Lo for testing
changes to at least 8 drivers. Thanks to pluknet@, Oliver Hartmann,
Olivier Cochard, gjb@, mmoll@, op@ and lev@, who also participated in
testing.
Reviewed by: adrian
Sponsored by: Netflix
Sponsored by: Nginx, Inc.
* 286410
* 286413
* 286416
The initial commit broke a variety of debug and features that aren't
in the GENERIC kernels but are enabled in other platforms.
with the net80211 stack.
Historical background: originally wireless devices created an interface,
just like Ethernet devices do. Name of an interface matched the name of
the driver that created. Later, wlan(4) layer was introduced, and the
wlanX interfaces become the actual interface, leaving original ones as
"a parent interface" of wlanX. Kernelwise, the KPI between net80211 layer
and a driver became a mix of methods that pass a pointer to struct ifnet
as identifier and methods that pass pointer to struct ieee80211com. From
user point of view, the parent interface just hangs on in the ifconfig
list, and user can't do anything useful with it.
Now, the struct ifnet goes away. The struct ieee80211com is the only
KPI between a device driver and net80211. Details:
- The struct ieee80211com is embedded into drivers softc.
- Packets are sent via new ic_transmit method, which is very much like
the previous if_transmit.
- Bringing parent up/down is done via new ic_parent method, which notifies
driver about any changes: number of wlan(4) interfaces, number of them
in promisc or allmulti state.
- Device specific ioctls (if any) are received on new ic_ioctl method.
- Packets/errors accounting are done by the stack. In certain cases, when
driver experiences errors and can not attribute them to any specific
interface, driver updates ic_oerrors or ic_ierrors counters.
Details on interface configuration with new world order:
- A sequence of commands needed to bring up wireless DOESN"T change.
- /etc/rc.conf parameters DON'T change.
- List of devices that can be used to create wlan(4) interfaces is
now provided by net.wlan.devices sysctl.
Most drivers in this change were converted by me, except of wpi(4),
that was done by Andriy Voskoboinyk. Big thanks to Kevin Lo for testing
changes to at least 8 drivers. Thanks to Olivier Cochard, gjb@, mmoll@,
op@ and lev@, who also participated in testing. Details here:
https://wiki.freebsd.org/projects/ifnet/net80211
Still, drivers: ndis, wtap, mwl, ipw, bwn, wi, upgt, uath were not
tested. Changes to mwl, ipw, bwn, wi, upgt are trivial and chances
of problems are low. The wtap wasn't compilable even before this change.
But the ndis driver is complex, and it is likely to be broken with this
commit. Help with testing and debugging it is appreciated.
Differential Revision: D2655, D2740
Sponsored by: Nginx, Inc.
Sponsored by: Netflix
doesn't get truncated to 32 bits.
Without this, 3x3 NICs transmitting at an MCS rate whose rix (rate
index) in the rate table is > 31 end up returning errors, as the
sample rate code doesn't think the rate is set in the rate table.
Tested:
* AR9380, STA, speaking 3x3 to an AP
This is required to support > MCS15 as more than 32 bit rate entries are
suddenly available.
This is quite messy - instead of doing typecasts at each mask operation,
this should be migrated to use a macro and have that do the typecast.
For now, the only module implement is 'sample', and that's only partially
implemented. The main issue here with reusing this structure in userland
is that it uses 'rix' everywhere, which requires the userland code to
have access to the current HAL rate table.
For now, this is a very large work in progress.
Specific details:
* The rate control information is per-node at the moment and wrapped
in a TLV, to ease parsing and backwards compatibility.
* .. but so I can be slack for now, the userland statistics are just
a copy of the kernel-land sample node state.
* However, for now use a temporary copy and change the rix entries
to dot11rate entries to make it slightly easier to eyeball.
Problems:
* The actual rate information table is unfortunately indexed by rix
and it doesn't contain a rate code. So the userland side of this
currently has no way to extract out a mapping.
TODO:
* Add a TLV payload to dump out the rate control table mapping so
'rix' can be turned into a dot11 / MCS rate.
* .. then remove the temporary copy.
been bait-and-switched from the rate control code.
This will avoid the panic that I saw and will avoid sending invalid rates
(eg 11a/11g OFDM rates when in 11b, on 11b-only NICs (AR5211)) where the
rate table is not "big".
It also will point out situations where this occurs for the 11n NICs
which will have sufficiently large rate tables that "invalid rix" doesn't
occur.
I'll try to follow this up with a commit that adds a current operating mode
check. The "rix" is only relevant to the current operating mode and rate
table.
PR: kern/165475
for Atheros AR5416 and later wireless devices.
This is a very large commit - the complete history can be
found in the user/adrian/if_ath_tx branch.
Legacy (ie, pre-AR5416) devices also use the per-software
TXQ support and (in theory) can support non-aggregation
ADDBA sessions. However, the net80211 stack doesn't currently
support this.
In summary:
TX path:
* queued frames normally go onto a per-TID, per-node queue
* some special frames (eg ADDBA control frames) are thrown
directly onto the relevant hardware queue so they can
go out before any software queued frames are queued.
* Add methods to create, suspend, resume and tear down an
aggregation session.
* Add in software retransmission of both normal and aggregate
frames.
* Add in completion handling of aggregate frames, including
parsing the block ack bitmap provided by the hardware.
* Write an aggregation function which can assemble frames into
an aggregate based on the selected rate control and channel
configuration.
* The per-TID queues are locked based on their target hardware
TX queue. This matches what ath9k/atheros does, and thus
simplified porting over some of the aggregation logic.
* When doing TX aggregation, stick the sequence number allocation
in the TX path rather than net80211 TX path, and protect it
by the TXQ lock.
Rate control:
* Delay rate control selection until the frame is about to
be queued to the hardware, so retried frames can have their
rate control choices changed. Frames with a static rate
control selection have that applied before each TX, just
to simplify the TX path (ie, not have "static" and "dynamic"
rate control special cased.)
* Teach ath_rate_sample about aggregates - both completion and
errors.
* Add an EWMA for tracking what the current "good" MCS rate is
based on failure rates.
Misc:
* Introduce a bunch of dirty hacks and workarounds so TID mapping
and net80211 frame inspection can be kept out of the net80211
layer. Because of the way this code works (and it's from Atheros
and Linux ath9k), there is a consistent, 1:1 mapping between
TID and AC. So we need to ensure that frames going to a specific
TID will _always_ end up on the right AC, and vice versa, or the
completion/locking will simply get very confused. I plan on
addressing this mess in the future.
Known issues:
* There is no BAR frame transmission just yet. A whole lot of
tidying up needs to occur before BAR frame TX can occur in the
"correct" place - ie, once the TID TX queue has been drained.
* Interface reset/purge/etc results in frames in the TX and RX
queues being removed. This creates holes in the sequence numbers
being assigned and the TX/RX AMPDU code (on either side) just
hangs.
* There's no filtered frame support at the present moment, so
stations going into power saving mode will simply have a number
of frames dropped - likely resulting in a traffic "hang".
* Raw frame TX is going to just not function with 11n aggregation.
Likely this needs to be modified to always override the sequence
number if the frame is going into an aggregation session.
However, general raw frame injection currently doesn't work in
general in net80211, so let's just ignore this for now until
this is sorted out.
* HT protection is just not implemented and won't be until the above
is sorted out. In addition, the AR5416 has issues RTS protecting
large aggregates (anything >8k), so the work around needs to be
ported and tested. Thus, this will be put on hold until the above
work is complete.
* The rate control module 'sample' is the only currently supported
module; onoe/amrr haven't been tested and have likely bit rotted
a little. I'll follow up with some commits to make them work again
for non-11n rates, but they won't be updated to handle 11n and
aggregation. If someone wishes to do so then they're welcome to
send along patches.
* .. and "sample" doesn't really do a good job of 11n TX. Specifically,
the metrics used (packet TX time and failure/success rates) isn't as
useful for 11n. It's likely that it should be extended to take into
account the aggregate throughput possible and then choose a rate
which maximises that. Ie, it may be acceptable for a higher MCS rate
with a higher failure to be used if it gives a more acceptable
throughput/latency then a lower MCS rate @ a lower error rate.
Again, patches will be gratefully accepted.
Because of this, ATH_ENABLE_11N is still not enabled by default.
Sponsored by: Hobnob, Inc.
Obtained from: Linux, Atheros
* Use 64 bit integer types for the sample rate statistics.
When TX'ing 11n aggregates, a 32 bit counter will overflow in a few
hours due to the high packet throughput.
* Create a default label of "" rather than defaulting to "Mb" - that way
if a rate hasn't yet been selected, it won't say "-1 Mb".
Sponsored by: Hobnob, Inc.
packet duration for the ath_rate_sample module.
This doesn't affect the packet TX at all; only how much time the
sample rate module attributes to a completed TX.
This doesn't yet take into account HT40 packet durations as the node info
(needed to know if it's a HT20 or HT40 node) isn't available everywhere
it needs to be.
This removes the chipset-dependent TX DMA completion descriptor groveling.
It should now be (more) portable to other, later atheros chipsets when the
time comes.
o eliminate private state indexed by 802.11 rate codes; use the hal's
rate tables directly to get the same info
o calculate a mask of operational rates to optimize lookups and checks
(instead of using for loops and similar)
o optimize size bin operations
o ignore rates marked as "do not use" in the hal phy tables
o fix bug that caused upshifting to break in 11g once the rate dropped
below 11Mb/s
o add more intelligent multi-rate tx schedules
o add support for 1/2 and 1/4 width channels
o add dev.ath.X.sample_stats sysctl to dump runtime statistics to the console
(needs to go up to a user app)
o export more tuning knobs via sysctls (still a couple of magic constants)
Note this includes changes to all drivers and moves some device firmware
loading to use firmware(9) and a separate module (e.g. ral). Also there
no longer are separate wlan_scan* modules; this functionality is now
bundled into the wlan module.
Supported by: Hobnob and Marvell
Reviewed by: many
Obtained from: Atheros (some bits)
o no more ds_vdata in tx/rx descriptors
o split h/w tx/rx descriptor from s/w status
o as part of the descriptor split change the rate control module api
so the ath_buf is passed in to the module so it can fetch both
descriptor and status information as needed
o add some const poisoning
Also for sample rate control algorithm:
o split debug msgs (node, rate, any)
o uniformly bounds check rate indices (and in some cases correct checks)
o move array index ops to after bounds checking
o use final tsi from the status block instead of the h/w descriptor
o replace h/w descriptor struct's with proper mask+shift defs (this
doesn't belong here; everything is known by the driver and should
just be sent down so there's no h/w-specific knowledge)
MFC after: 1 month
