Beta Wifi - Beta Testing A Small Fix

[EvilDragon]

Well, more work on WiFi has been done and we are currently betatesting a new firmware for the WiFi module.
This is only a first step of more fixes to come, but we'd like to see how it behaves on units which have big WiFi problems.

skeezix unit, e.g. didn't connect to WiFi at all and now runs with 400KB/s.
On another unit however, nothing changed.

So we'd like to get some more users to test it - especially users who have stability issues.

We're still working on this and therefore do not want to make it public yet, but if you're one of the users having stability issues, please send me a PM.

As said, this does not fix all issues, but it's a first start of improving WiFi.

 

[milkshake]

I have always had speed issues I posted the bug on the bug tracker http://bugs.openpandora.org/index.php?do=details&task_id=140 I would love to beta test this.

 

[EvilDragon]

Well, it probably won't fix any speed issues, but things like connection becoming slower or stalling.

For speed issues, try using a different WiFi channel (11 seems to be fine).
While testing, this also sped up WiFi from 30KB/s to 300KB/s

 

[WizardStan]

Here's my experience:
Old driver, power save on, average pings around 60ms, occasionally spikes as high as 600 and beyond, packet loss is around 3 or 4%. Takes a second to "warm up" when transfer starts, meaning higher ping times and more dropped packets, but subsequent tests are improved so long as they're run within a reasonable length of time. Average speed starts off at about 100KB/s, climbs to about 250KB/s, kinda bounces around a bit between 200 and 300: it's not perfectly stable, but does pretty well.
Power save off, average pings around 20ms, occasionally spikes as high as 600 still, packet loss is about 1%. (10-15 in 1000). Average speed starts and remains at a fairly constant 250KB/s.

New driver, power save on, average ping is still around 60ms, but spikes are non-existent. In 1000 pings, it lists 86ms as it's max. Packet loss is also extremely low: first time I ran the test, 5 of the first 10 were lost, but once it had "warmed up", only 4 packets in 1000 were lost! Speed is still between 200 and 300KB.
Power save off, same as before. Average ping around 20ms (little lower, actually) but no huge spikes! Max in 1000 pings was only 78ms! And stable! 4 packets in 1000 as well! Speed is also fairly stable, still only 250KB/s.

I think I can recommend this driver. It may not improve speed directly, but the stability factor alone (decreasing ping times and packet loss) should definitely help a lot of people.

Speed tested with a 45MB download off a local http server with wget. Pings measured with 1500 byte payloads.

 

[DrCJBoduma]

Hi,

Just had a quick go with the new wifi beta, have no stats to speak of, but just generally there doesn't seem to be any appreciable difference to the general browser experience. Pages seem to take about the same time to load and I still have to reload pages a lot to get them to load (sometimes they still don't load at all)

Thanks for the continued hard work on this though.

CJ

 

[mosschops]

Quick update.

installed the update, but the disconnect then cant reconnect until enable/disable wifi issue is back. speed did seem higher downloading a file through chromium but it was sub 100k on an N router. Initial connect speed seemed low with high ping times to my local NAS. Will do some more fiddling

 

[ljones]

Just been trying the new driver, but unfortunatly I have to report failure -- with the old driver I had connection/disconnect problems and still have the same problems with the new driver - the wifi connection is dropped if I stop using it after a very short time (or so it appears).

No idea if it helps but I have lots of lines in dmesg which read [ 1378.654205] wl1251: rare event 01000000 - the number in the [ ] brackets changes on each line. Maybe the old driver and new driver have got mixed up?

edit: Here's a copy of the last few lines of my demsg;

[   69.742553] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): wlan0: link becomes ready
[   73.950439] wl1251: rare event: 01000000
[   78.559112] wl1251: rare event: 01000000
[   79.879425] wlan0: no IPv6 routers present
[   83.480895] wl1251: rare event: 01000000
[   89.105957] wl1251: rare event: 01000000
[   91.298492] wl1251: rare event: 02000000
[   93.611419] wl1251: rare event: 01000000
[   94.755371] wl1251: rare event: 02000000
[   97.502593] wl1251: rare event: 01000000
[   98.162719] wl1251: rare event: 02000000
[  102.828125] wl1251: rare event: 01000000
[  105.694519] wl1251: rare event: 01000000
[  110.200134] wl1251: rare event: 01000000
[  115.017028] wl1251: rare event: 01000000
[  119.416137] wl1251: rare event: 01000000
[  124.229034] wl1251: rare event: 01000000
[  128.529754] wl1251: rare event: 01000000
[  132.831634] wl1251: rare event: 01000000
[  136.318542] wl1251: rare event: 02000000
[  140.305816] wl1251: rare event: 01000000
[  145.028717] wl1251: rare event: 01000000
[  149.528045] wl1251: rare event: 01000000
[  153.416137] wl1251: rare event: 01000000

Edit2: I tried the following -- running (first) in a terminal

ping www.google.com

And at the same time going to wikipedia via the midori web browser. After about 15-20 or so seconds (guessing here!) both ping and midori stopped dead (that is, no internet).

ljones

 

[whynodd]

General advice guys: Disconnect other WLan-Gadgets from your Router and test again. My router for example has problems with Pandora and PC when they are both connected at the same time. With Pandora only, wifi works great and stays connected. Maybe the Pandora confuses some routers (DHCP related issue? don't know..).

Anyway, it took some time to find out that I have to disconnect the PC to use wlan properly with my Pandora. Maybe that is why disconnects seem to happen "randomly".

 

[hitbyambulance]

Random suggestion: what happens when IPv6 support is disabled on either/both of the Pandora and the router?

 

[EvilDragon]

General advice guys: Disconnect other WLan-Gadgets from your Router and test again. My router for example has problems with Pandora and PC when they are both connected at the same time. With Pandora only, wifi works great and stays connected. Maybe the Pandora confuses some routers (DHCP related issue? don't know..).

Anyway, it took some time to find out that I have to disconnect the PC to use wlan properly with my Pandora. Maybe that is why disconnects seem to happen "randomly".

Hm, that's the problem skeezix had and this new firmware fixed exactly this problem.

 

[jdbye]

I tried the beta firmware at dad's house, and it doesn't seem to make any difference, downloads still keep stalling, but the signal strength was pretty low, so I might have better results at home. Going home tonight, so I'll probably test it some more then or tomorrow.
At least it hasn't made it any worse.

 

[mcobit]

I can report, that not much changed. But I get a bit better speeds, when the server sends with good speed.

Also I recognized before, that Pandora doesn't get a high priority on my network. When I download a large file with my other pc, the wifispeed on pandora is veeeeeeery slow.

Also: Are these new drivers? They seem to be dated 08.10.2010.

Or could this link be helpful?

 

[mosschops]

Another quick update.

I followed the advice above and made sure there were no other devices using wifi (the only thing likely is an iphone). I suffered no disconnections with a constant speed of around 57.6k/sec from my local NAS over (presumably G) with 4 bars showing on the connection status. re-connecting the iphone shows a 3-4k drop and subsequent rise if it is disconnected. I was still able to download the 180MB odd file though, albeit at a stately pace.

 

[milkshake]

I too have tested the new driver and can safely say it doesnt seem to be any different, although I can confirm I am yet to drop a connection with the new firmware but it doesnt fix any speed issues i.e. transfers starting fast then slowing down to in between 30-50k/sec

 

[EvilDragon]

Yes, as said, it should NOT improve the speed unless you couldn't connect at all before.
I had some German user report that his WiFi also works with this one and didn't work at all before.

This firmware is just a test to see if we're heading into the right direction and prevent the stalling a bit more. It will slow down, but not stall.

 

[WizardStan]

This firmware is just a test to see if we're heading into the right direction and prevent the stalling a bit more. It will slow down, but not stall.

As I said, in my testing that was the case: no randomly huge ping times and fewer dropped packets. But to be fair, my wifi was pretty good to begin with.
A suggestion: for the purposes of standardization, people should run something like the following command

# turn power saving on to test
sudo iwconfig wlan0 power on
# do a small ping to "warm up" the module.  This is required for power save mode, other wise the first few packets tend to get lost.  Ignore the output of this
sudo ping 192.168.1.254 -s 1500 -c 4
# an actual test, note this output!
sudo ping 192.168.1.254 -s 1500 -c 1000 -f
# turn power saving off and try again
sudo iwconfig wlan0 power off
sudo ping 192.168.1.254 -s 1500 -c 1000 -f

Replace the ip with your own router's IP of course. This'll give some standardized statistics of both power off and power on mode, as well as an approximate transfer speed (1000*1500*2/(time/100))

edit: whoops, mistyped the iwconfig lines

 

[milkshake]

I was just writing this to give feedback thats all the driver is better than the old one.

 

[jdbye]

Just gave it a go at home, here are my results:

Old wifi firmware: Starts out at about 300kb/s then varies between 30kb/s and 300kb/s.
New wifi firmware: Starts out at about 300kb/s then varies between 70kb/s and 300kb/s.
Both with power management off downloading a linux distro in wget. Not a huge improvement, but an improvement nonetheless. The new wifi firmware never dropped below 70kb/s.

 

[skeezix]

I've not had time ot test all weekend (too sick, and family stuff)..

New firmware does let me use Wifi _at all_, which is great. (And a huge change to my pandora usage patterns
Speed is 80-500K/S .. pretty amazing really.

Stuff like ssh will basicly stay up forever (great!)
Browsing .. always hangs after a few page refreshes (Firefox + Chromium, didn't try Midori/Arora yet.) Surprised that both Chromium and FF were impacted. Just hit refresh 5 times on slashdot and .. 'page hangs' untoil browser requests to kill it, but basicly kills browser. During this state, other wifi usage is totally fine (pings and ssh's stayed up and work fine), so it seems like the browsers just get bunked up. (NAND and SD are not full, not a cache full problem.) -- any clue? I basciyl cannot browse .. annoying now that wifi works
wget a giant file such as pandora firmware, and it always hangs the whole wifi at around the same point 34MB (power savings on); once I got 40mb, but was fiddling with power savings and cpu speeds and sundry settings.

I have not yet had time to wget 1MB files 60 times and see if things cock up at 35 files or not, that will be interesting; ie: I'm wondering if its single large file xfers are blowing counters up for me somewhere, or if its total bandwidth consumed.

So two main problems for me, but not sure they're related to this firmware or not, since the old one doesn't work at all for me.

Overall, this fw is a huge boon; can IRC all day

jeff

 

[jonlad1]

I can confirm the browser hang issue happens for me too with latest Chromium. Dont use Firefox cos its a bit slow