Re: madwifi and NetworkManager

[Charles <nm bellcore net>]

On Mon, 2004-11-15 at 16:23 -0500, Shaya Potter wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-11-15 at 12:35 -0500, Shaya Potter wrote:
> > so I was having problems w/ NetworkManager and my madwifi using T42p, I
> > noticed this thread
> > 
> > http://mail.gnome.org/archives/networkmanager-list/2004-November/msg00090.html
> > 
> > and yes, iwlist was giving me issues.  so I started instrumenting the
> > driver and iwlist itself.
> > 
> > it appears madwifi takes a while to return, and iwlist was timing out.
> > if I reset iwlist's timeouts to 2 seconds each (as opposed to 250ms and
> > 100ms) it worked perfectly each time.
> > 
> > could it be a similiar problem w/ NetworkManager?
> > 
> > obviously madwifi has issues, I've set an e-mail to it's -dev mailing
> > list, as dont have a clue right now about how its internals work, so
> > dont know how to fix it there.
> 
> well it doesn't seem to be a madwifi issue according to the main
> developer.
> 
> ----
> Current code + current iwlist will not work if there's a short timeout.
> 
> Applications that timeout scanning requests do so out of fear that the
> driver is busted.  Typically such timeouts were chosen for 11b-only
> cards where you need to scan only 3-4 channels.  For multi-mode cards
> any "deadman timeouts" must be longer.  wpa_supplicant used to have a
> short timeout; now it defers the decision to the driver where it knows
> better.
> 
> FWIW Microsoft requires that drivers return scan results within 2
> seconds (if memory serves me).
> ----
> 
> things I noticed with the NetworkManager code, it seems to only wait
> half a second, tried changing it to 2 seconds in one place, but it
> didn't seem to accomplish anything of value, so there could be other
> issues.


  I think the issue is indeed the timeout values.  I see the same issue
(as does everyone else with a 5212 Atheros based card) and find it quite
annoying.