field and into a separate fast-frames staging pointer in ieee80211_node.
The A-MPDU TX path allows txa_private to be used by drivers. So it will
clash with any attempt to use fast-frames. Now, fast-frames is not really
anything special - it's just a custom ethernet frame type that contains
two MSDUs into one MPDU. So all the NIC has to support doing is transmitting
up to a 4KiB frame with an arbitrary ethertype and bam! Fast-frames.
However, using txa_private means we can /either/ do fast-frames or A-MPDU TX,
so fast frames has been turned off in the Atheros HAL for 11n chipsets.
This is a bit silly - it actually means that 802.11 performance to/from
11abg Atheros chips is actually better than between an 11abg atheros device
and an 11n Atheros device.
So:
* create a new mbuf staging queue for fast frames. It only queues a single
frame in the staging queue (and there's a top-level ic staging queue
used for expiry/tracking) so it's just an mbuf pointer per TID.
* Still use the ampdu TX packet counter to determine whether to do
aggregation or not. It'll double count if we start doing both A-MPDU TX
and fast frames, but that's not all that important right now.
* Initialise the pps tracker so ticks isn't zero. This ensures that
fast-frames actually gets used - without it, the ticks math overflows
and the pps math always sets txa_pps=0. This is the same bug that
plagued A-MPDU TX starting logic.
This actually allows fast-frames transmit to occur between the AR9331
(in 11n HT/20 mode) and AR9170 (if_otus) in 11bg mode.
Now, this is a great big no-op on atheros 11n hardware, so don't worry.
It may mean you start seeing more reliable fast-frames transmission on
11abg hardware which may expose some more amusing bugs.
TODO:
* further testing and debugging of all of this before flipping on
fast-frames in if_ath (for 11n) and if_otus.
d029471197