I have a Compaq (HP) laptop with an Atheros 802.11g chipset - it is detected as an AR2425, but I think its actual model number is AR5006EG. This is one of the chips that required madwifi prior to 11.1, but the new ath5k driver in the kernel now supports it (sort of).
Connectivity basically works, but performance is generally poor, and I seem to be getting about 10% packet loss when I ping the default gateway or any other host on the wireless network. By contrast, I have a Linksys router configured as a bridge on the same network, and a host behind that bridge can ping other wireless hosts with no packet loss. And it works fine when I boot the laptop into Vista.
Is this a known problem with this driver - and is there any hope of being able to improve the performance?
tried changing the channel ? sometimes interference can cause this
Andy
I am still at 11.0, using madwifi. I had trouble with connectivity while I was on “ifup”. Changing to Knetworkmanager speeded up things.
Also, as @Deltaflyer44 said, changing channel might do the trick, as for some reason, my works best at channel 6.
I am not very expirienced in this, but that little tweaks just worked right.
I just upgraded my system to Suse 11.1, and it installed the ath5k driver. I
started having trouble with network access, and found that the response time
to the wireless router in my house was lousy:
glenn@DepotRd:~> ping 192.168.2.1
PING 192.168.2.1 (192.168.2.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 192.168.2.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=1233 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.2.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=1901 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.2.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=1550 ms
So I pulled the madwifi-0.9.4-1.src.rpm, and re-configured to use the ath_pci
driver. The results were much better:
glenn@DepotRd:~> ping 192.168.2.1
PING 192.168.2.1 (192.168.2.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 192.168.2.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.493 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.2.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.485 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.2.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.501 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.2.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=0.518 ms
The card I have is the Netgear WG311T, which reports with PCI ID
0x168c:0x0013, and in the log as “Atheros Communications Inc. Atheros AR5001X+
Wireless Network Adapter (rev 01)”.
Why don’t you make a test:
blacklist ath5k, and install madwifi.
If it is the same, return back to ath5k, if it solves problem, then there is a problem with ath5k
The above problem looks a little different from mine (response time is fine, but some packets are dropped), and my hardware is different as well. (edit: I’ve also tried multiple channels with no change.)
I was never able to get the stable madwifi to work with this card - apparently it requires some development branch to support it, unless that’s changed recently. Part of the reason I installed openSUSE in the first place was that it supports my card without any messing around with madwifi. so maybe I’ll just hold out for a kernel update.