Smart NICs with firmware (eg wpi, iwn, the new atheros parts, the intel 7260
series, etc) support doing a lot of things in firmware. This includes but
isn't limited to things like scanning, sending probe requests and receiving
probe responses. However, net80211 doesn't know about any of this - it still
drives the whole scan/probe infrastructure itself.
In order to move towards suppoting smart NICs, the receive path needs to
know about the channel/details for each received packet. In at least
the iwn and 7260 firmware (and I believe wpi, but I haven't tried it yet)
it will do the scanning, power-save and off-channel buffering for you -
all you need to do is handle receiving beacons and probe responses on
channels that aren't what you're currently on. However the whole receive
path is peppered with ic->ic_curchan and manual scan/powersave handling.
The beacon parsing code also checks ic->ic_curchan to determine if the
received beacon is on the correct channel or not.[1]
So:
* add freq/ieee values to ieee80211_rx_stats;
* change ieee80211_parse_beacon() to accept the 'current' channel
as an argument;
* modify the iv_input() and iv_recv_mgmt() methods to include the rx_stats;
* add a new method - ieee80211_lookup_channel_rxstats() - that looks up
a channel based on the contents of ieee80211_rx_stats;
* if it exists, use it in the mgmt path to switch the current channel
(which still defaults to ic->ic_curchan) over to something determined
by rx_stats.
This is enough to kick-start scan offload support in the Intel 7260
driver that Rui/I are working on. It also is a good start for scan
offload support for a handful of existing NICs (wpi, iwn, some USB
parts) and it'll very likely dramatically improve stability/performance
there. It's not the whole thing - notably, we don't need to do powersave,
we should not scan all channels, and we should leave probe request sending
to the firmware and not do it ourselves. But, this allows for continued
development on the above features whilst actually having a somewhat
working NIC.
TODO:
* Finish tidying up how the net80211 input path works.
Right now ieee80211_input / ieee80211_input_all act as the top-level
that everything feeds into; it should change so the MIMO input routines
are those and the legacy routines are phased out.
* The band selection should be done by the driver, not by the net80211
layer.
* ieee80211_lookup_channel_rxstats() only determines 11b or 11g channels
for now - this is enough for scanning, but not 100% true in all cases.
If we ever need to handle off-channel scan support for things like
static-40MHz or static-80MHz, or turbo-G, or half/quarter rates,
then we should extend this.
[1] This is a side effect of frequency-hopping and CCK modes - you
can receive beacons when you think you're on a different channel.
In particular, CCK (which is used by the low 11b rates, eg beacons!)
is decodable from adjacent channels - just at a low SNR.
FH is a side effect of having the hardware/firmware do the frequency
hopping - it may pick up beacons transmitted from other FH networks
that are in a different phase of hopping frequencies.
buffers (ie, >4GB on amd64.)
The underlying problem was that PREREAD doesn't sync the mbuf
with the DMA memory (ie, bounce buffer), so the bounce buffer may
have had stale information. Thus it was always considering the
buffer completed and things just went off the rails.
This change does the following:
* Make ath_rx_pkt() always consume the mbuf somehow; it no longer
passes error mbufs (eg CRC errors, crypt errors, etc) back up
to the RX path to recycle. This means that a new mbuf is always
allocated each time, but it's cleaner.
* Push the RX buffer map/unmap to occur in the RX path, not
ath_rx_pkt(). Thus, ath_rx_pkt() now assumes (a) it has to consume
the mbuf somehow, and (b) that it's already been unmapped and
synced.
* For the legacy path, the descriptor isn't mapped, it comes out of
coherent, DMA memory anyway. So leave it there.
* For the EDMA path, the RX descriptor has to be cleared before
its passed to the hardware, so that when we check with
a POSTREAD sync, we actually get either a blank (not finished)
or a filled out descriptor (finished.) Otherwise we get stale
data in the DMA memory.
* .. so, for EDMA RX path, we need PREREAD|PREWRITE to sync the
data -> DMA memory, then POSTREAD|POSTWRITE to finish syncing
the DMA memory -> data.
* Whilst we're here, make sure that in EDMA buffer setup (ie,
bzero'ing the descriptor part) is done before the mbuf is
map/synched.
NOTE: there's been a lot of commits besides this one with regards to
tidying up the busdma handling in ath(4). Please check the recent
commit history.
Discussed with and thanks to: scottl
Tested:
* AR5416 (non-EDMA) on i386, with the DMA tag for the driver
set to 2^^30, not 2^^32, STA
* AR9580 (EDMA) on i386, as above, STA
* User - tested AR9380 on amd64 with 32GB RAM.
PR: kern/177530
The RX EDMA support requires a modified approach to the RX descriptor
handling.
Specifically:
* There's now two RX queues - high and low priority;
* The RX queues are implemented as FIFOs; they're now an array of pointers
to buffers;
* .. and the RX buffer and descriptor are in the same "buffer", rather than
being separate.
So to that end, this commit abstracts out most of the RX related functions
from the bulk of the driver. Notably, the RX DMA/buffer allocation isn't
updated, primarily because I haven't yet fleshed out what it should look
like.
Whilst I'm here, create a set of matching but mostly unimplemented EDMA
stubs.
Tested:
* AR9280, station mode
TODO:
* Thorough AP and other mode testing for non-EDMA chips;
* Figure out how to allocate RX buffers suitable for RX EDMA, including
correctly setting the mbuf length to compensate for the RX descriptor
and completion status area.
* migrate the rx processing out into if_ath_rx.c
* migrate the TSF functions into if_ath_tsf.h, as inlines
This is in prepration for supporting the EDMA RX routines, required to
support the AR93xx series NICs.
TODO:
* ath_start() shouldn't be private, but it's called as part of
the RX path. I should likely migrate ath_rx_tasklet() back into
if_ath.c and then return this to be 'static'. The RX code really
shouldn't need to see TX routines (and vice versa.)
* ath_beacon_* should be in if_ath_beacon.[ch].
* ath_tdma_* should be in if_ath_tdma.[ch] ...
