[Prism54-users] terminal prism54 performance problems

[Luis R. Rodriguez]

On Wed, Aug 18, 2004 at 10:47:19PM +0100, Paul Jakma wrote:
> On Wed, 18 Aug 2004, Luis R. Rodriguez wrote:
> 
> >Just the keyboard right? You can still use the mouse? I've seen 
> >this happen to me only when using a display manager (gdm, kdm, 
> >xmd). I didn't look further into it.
> 
> Well, this is from console in single user mode. So I dont know.
> 
> However, if I let boot to run level 5, X and gdm will never come up, 
> which would be inline with prism54 having wedged having disabled 
> interrupts.
> 
> Note that not even alt+sysrq works..

Thanks, I think we'll have to review interrupt work and islpci_eth.[ch].

> >Regarding the high traffic flow causing problems:
> 
> It's not even high-traffic though. 50kB/s will kill it in short 
> order.

This sucks.

> >3com. It may be the case 3com uses Prism GT and the network traffic 
> >problems are occuring on Prism Frisbee based cards. My 
> >understanding is Frisbee chipset based cards (apparantly most on 
> >the market) just has a cheaper Zero-IF (ZIF) architecture. Not sure 
> >if this could have an effect on traffic jams.
> 
> I've no idea really. Apparently WG511 does work fine for some (eg 
> Margit2 on #prism54), so..

You said you were using WEP though no? Not many people use WEP and I
know from first hand experience that the driver isn't working well in
extended MLME mode. I forget if we use extended or intermediate mode for 
WEP but intermediate mode is almost like extended so I wouldn't be
surprised that this is the problem.

The main problem I am aware of that we still have to fix for extended
mode is how we set oids and commit them.

> >Please try again with the latest CVS as CVS had some errors and were
> >recenlty fixed -- see ChangeLog for details.
> 
> Ah, ok. Will give it another go.
> 
> >Try 1.0.3.0 as its been reported is more stable.
> 
> Ok.
> 
> >I know of no newer firmware. After those I believe the softmac driver
> >was the focus of development.
> 
> No idea what that means :)

Paul,

After the Prism GT/Frisbee Conexant worked on another Prism chipset
which uses a software MAC, and the driver hence is bigger. I believe
1.0.4.3 was the last firmware release to a manufacturer they did before
focusing more on the Software MAC based chipset and drivers.

Apparantly the SoftMAC driver is supposed to be backward compatible with
the FullMAC chipsets (like prism GT/Frisbee). I do not yet know much of
these chipsets though.

> >Let us know how it goes. If problems persists, please e-mail
> >prism54-devel instead.
> 
> What debug info would be useful?

Unfortunately a lot of debug level information has been nuked from the
driver as it was apparant it was getting stable. Fooled weren't we?

Regardless we still spit out some useful info. Send us:

dmesg -c > /dev/null
ifconfig eth0 up # or DHCP/Get IP/asssign ESSID etc
# Do your thing, DL stuff/etc
dmesg -c > output.txt # after you eject the card so you gain keyboard access

send us output.txt

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