[OpenWrt-Devel] [RFC] mac80211: update to wireless-testing 2015-03-09

[Bryan Forbes]

I have been working on an update to mac80211 for about a month now. I announced it on the developer forums, but it turns out this is the place I should have been talking about it. The initial work I did was to update mac80211 to wireless-testing master-2015-02-09, but since then I have updated to master-2015-03-09. All of the work I have done can be found on github:

https://github.com/bryanforbes/openwrt/tree/bryan-2015-03-09

The 7 latest commits in that branch are the sum of the work I’ve done. In brief:

* 2e65c87: generic: export get_net_ns_by_fd for use by newer compat-wireless
    Adds get_net_ns_by_fd to the symbol export table so net/wireless/nl80211.c can use it
* e476096: iw: update to 3.17
    As it says, update iw to 3.17
* c15b7a5: mac80211: update to wireless-testing 2015-03-09
    This is the major work. I created a backport release from wireless-testing 2015-03-09 (for now, the tarball lives on my server), refreshed and deleted patches, and created a patch to revert all cryptoapi ports from net/mac80211.
* 1ef4f62: iw: sync nl80211.h
    nl80211.h in wireless-testing changed quite a bit and iw has a copy from an earlier release; this syncs the two
* 6baeebe: iwinfo: sync nl80211.h
    Same as 1ef4f62, but for iwinfo
* 5b207be: hostapd: sync nl80211.h and refresh patches
    Same as 1ef4f62, but for hostapd. This also refreshes some fuzzy patches.
* 2e8adba: mac80211: Use newer firmware for ath10k
    This grabs a newer firmware from the ath10k-firmware repo. The STA firmware and board.bin stayed the same, but this updates the Makefile to get 10.2.4/firmware-4.bin_10.2.4.45.

I built a custom firmware incorporating these changes yesterday and have been running it on an Archer C7 v2 for about half a day. Previous wireless-testing snapshots (master-2015-02-09 and master-2015-03-05-2) were also quite stable. I don’t have any other hardware to test this on, so I can only confirm the stability of the ath9k and ath10k drivers.

There are a few things I’d like to ask about in addition to asking for comment on the update:

* When I first started this update, I removed the patch which reverted the AES-CCM port in mac80211 and attempted to use the kernel’s cryptoapi modules (along with creating a kmod-crypto-ccm package). After briefly talking with Felix last week(?) on IRC, he let me know that I would need to revert all of the cryptoapi ports done in wireless-testing. Once I did that (100-revert-cryptoapi-ports.patch, which contains a comment detailing the commits reverted), the wireless drivers began to work. My question is two-fold:
** Why is it required to remove the cryptoapi ports to get the wireless drivers working on OpenWRT?
** Does this mean that users of OpenWRT won’t be able to configure and use the ciphers ported? (GCMP, GCMP-256, CCMP-256, BIP-CMAC-256, BIP-GMAC-128, and BIP-GMAC-256)

* I updated the ath10k-firmware used from 10.2/firmware-3.bin_10.2-00082-4-2 to 10.2.4/firmware-4.bin_10.2.4.45. I believe I did this correctly (it loads fine in my Archer C7 v2), but will this work for all ath10k hardware? I know the ath10k driver will try different versions of firmware until one works (firmware-4.bin, firmware-3.bin, etc.), but I didn’t think that OpenWRT would want to distribute several firmware files only to have one ever used. There aren’t release notes in the ath10k-firmware repository, so I’m unsure if firmware-4.bin will work on older hardware. Please advise.

Thanks in advance for taking the time to review. Hopefully I’ve done this right. If not, let me know and I’ll take steps to do whatever is necessary to get this into OpenWRT.

--
Bryan Forbes
http://www.reigndropsfall.net

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