Release WiFi Driver / Firmware Betatest
- Thread starter EvilDragon
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WizardStan
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Indeed, I was gaming on a 14.4 modem way back in the day. Even modern games, Counterstrike, Diablo 2, no problems. My brother still plays Warcraft 3 on a 56K modem. If 5KB/s (actually less because my parents have a crappy phone line, more like 2.5 or 3) is enough, 40KB/s should be through the roof.
Standard definition videos off of youtube should pose only little problem for 40KB/s: that's approximately the rate they're encoded at; a 10 minute video is 22MB, or 38KB/s. You'll see some buffering at the start, for sure, but give it a few seconds and it should, assuming the connection is stable, play just fine.
No, 40KB/s is plenty and you should not be concerned that it is only 40KB/s; stop trying to insist that 40KB/s is worthless.
What you should be concerned about is that it is not supposed to be 40KB/s. Sure, 40KB/s is provably acceptable, but it should be between 500 and 900 under proper conditions, 300 at least. But there's the rub: what are these proper conditions and how can we make everything a proper condition? Notaz has been busy working on it and I commend him his efforts. He's made a lot of progress. Even my wifi which was already working pretty well has been improved by his efforts.
That's the bad thing about YouTube caching. It always things it has the constant speed it starts with.
I had 6 months of unusable YouTube with my ISP due to that - somehow it started fast and slowed down... and YouTube then didn't cache properly.
milkshake
Advanced Member
I just cant wait till the chip company has a look at the issue people are having.
tsh
Active Member
Wifi tether to android 2.2 works fine. Maybe that isn't what you meant?
milkshake
Advanced Member
lol what you on about? if that were the case how come all my other wifi products (laptop, netbook, iphone, xbox360) all work fine at normal speeds?
Well, that's the problem - various different devices have various different problems with various routers.
For example, check out the Nintendo Wii WiFi troubleshooting page.
They tell you what settings you need to change to make your router work with the Wii in case you have problems.
I know some Wiis won't connect to some routers at all.
With the new driver, most Pandoras should work with most routers at a stable speed of about 300 - 500 kB/s.
Mostly if you have problems, changing the channel on the router fixes it.
It's not easy doing proper WiFi stuff... heck no. That's something we learnt.
milkshake
Advanced Member
I also forgot to mention my wii works fine with my router also 
Edy
Member
I'm also getting these exact symptoms with the new driver. No noticeable improvements but several new problems introduced. I know that a lot of hard work is behind this one, but... you understand, I can only speak for what I see.
(Not to mention the web browsers crashing or freezing continuously, no matter which one are you using - actually it's quite a pain to navigate internet from Pandora and many times I had to give up and switch to my netbook)
On a positive side, I've been able to connect with WEP. Not sure if this driver made the difference (I found that the password was wrong in one case) but at least now I know that it works.
EDIT: Another thing: now the WiFi is always enabled on startup. Is there any way to configure this behavior? I want it to start disabled.
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Hmm... that's two users then with problems. Weird...
Which ones are you using?
Midori crashes easily, yes. Chromium-Dev is unstable, but both FireFox, Fennec and normal Chromium haven't crashed for me yet.
Any website where it crashes?
You can change that in the Startup-Settings (found in System-Menu)
notaz
Certified Guru
The selector doesn't touch the driver, your issues look wifi driver unrelated to me.
About the freezes with firefox and chromium: At some point in time I had the same troubles. But in the end it was dev lo that was brought down, so local traffic was not possible. According to ifup lo, lo was already brought up, so something must have been bringing down the interface without using ifupdown, maybe a simple ip link set down somewhere, with the wrong interface name.
Anyway: you should be able to fix that by doing: ifdown lo;ifup lo . You must bring it down so the ifupdown administration knows it's down.
I can confirm that on shutdown I have to reset the pandora, since it's hanging somewhere, and I don't have a serial console to look at it yet. (But I do have a jtag adapter now! Jay!).
About wifi speed:
The HF4 version gave me around 800kB/s steady streaming of a 100MB file with a WNDR3700 running backfire 10.3.1-rc3 (ath9k ap). With a wrt54gl running kamikaze 7.06 and 2.4 kernel I get a regular disconnect, after which I have to unload the driver, and load it again to reset it.
The beta version gives me around 400kB/s steady streaming, the disconnects to the wr54gl seems less, but what's weird is that traffic seems to stall. A download stops, while I can still ping the gateway. These last things I need to check further. Fortunately an ethernet usb dongle really works perfect. I got 10.5MB/s through it, with the bottleneck probably being that that traffic went through a WNDR3700, and then tunneled over vlan/ethernet/gre/ip tunnel through a 100Mb/s switch and some routers, before it was terminated into a gre tunnel server.
Anyway: roaming against the WNDR3700 seems to be ok with both.
Anyway: you should be able to fix that by doing: ifdown lo;ifup lo . You must bring it down so the ifupdown administration knows it's down.
I can confirm that on shutdown I have to reset the pandora, since it's hanging somewhere, and I don't have a serial console to look at it yet. (But I do have a jtag adapter now! Jay!).
About wifi speed:
The HF4 version gave me around 800kB/s steady streaming of a 100MB file with a WNDR3700 running backfire 10.3.1-rc3 (ath9k ap). With a wrt54gl running kamikaze 7.06 and 2.4 kernel I get a regular disconnect, after which I have to unload the driver, and load it again to reset it.
The beta version gives me around 400kB/s steady streaming, the disconnects to the wr54gl seems less, but what's weird is that traffic seems to stall. A download stops, while I can still ping the gateway. These last things I need to check further. Fortunately an ethernet usb dongle really works perfect. I got 10.5MB/s through it, with the bottleneck probably being that that traffic went through a WNDR3700, and then tunneled over vlan/ethernet/gre/ip tunnel through a 100Mb/s switch and some routers, before it was terminated into a gre tunnel server.
Anyway: roaming against the WNDR3700 seems to be ok with both.
Tor
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So (glancing towards my Apple USB Ethernet dongle) one way forward would be to find some wi-fi dongle that plugs directly into an Ethernet port and use it with the USB/Eth dongle..
I wonder if there is such a thing.Vitel
Active Member
The driver no longer disconnects my WPA2 connection. Works pretty stable. Thanks a lot devs.
mosschops
Member
So (glancing towards my Apple USB Ethernet dongle) one way forward would be to find some wi-fi dongle that plugs directly into an Ethernet port and use it with the USB/Eth dongle..
yes there are such things but no drivers to support them.
I tested the latest version last night.
all from my local NAS via wifi obv
i downloaded a 90MB file at between 70-100k from a compaq cp2q running WEP, no disconnects
same file from a netgear wnr2000 running wpa ran at the same speed but disconnected and wouldnt reconnect automatically as the last beta seemed to.
an 8mb file from the WNR2000 reported starting at a high speed 600k/sec then rapidly kept dropping until the file completed and then suffered a disconnect which wouldnt autro reconnect nor would reconnect if i clicked "connect" on the prompt that popped up.
generally there seemed to be a very high latency connecting to anything outside of my network with stuff inside not as bad but still very ponderous to locate but quick to render.
There is a noticable difference using the wnr2000 when using a specific channel as opposed to automatic on the router side (having tried whatever channel's 1 & 11 are supposed to mean when its set to europe as its place of living).
Austin25
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Good progress on the lost connections! I'm disappointed to hear that there won't be Ad-hoc mode, because I'm using an old desktop with a wifi card that only supports Ad-hoc (not Master) mode. Would Ad-hoc even be possible on the Pandora? Would Master mode? :blink:
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WizardStan
Mega GP Mania
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They're possible, they're just not supported in the driver because the original code was lifted from a phone and the developers didn't see any need to include that feature at the time.
