The symptom: sometimes 11n (and non-11n) throughput is great.
Sometimes it isn't. Much teeth gnashing occured, and much kernel
bisecting happened, until someone figured out it was the order
of which things were rebooted, not the kernel versions.
(Which was great news to me, it meant that I hadn't broken if_ath.)
What we found was that sometimes the WME parameters for the best-effort
queue had a burst window ("txop") in which the station would be allowed
to TX as many packets as it could fit inside that particular burst
window. This improved throughput.
After initially thinking it was a bug - the WME parameters for the
best-effort queue -should- have a txop of 0, Bernard and I discovered
"aggressive mode" in net80211 - where the WME BE queue parameters
are changed if there's not a lot of high priority traffic going on.
The WME parameters announced in the association response and beacon
frames just "change" based on what the current traffic levels are.
So in fact yes, the STA was acutally supposed to be doing this higher
throughput stuff as it's just meant to be configuring things based on
the WME parameters - but it wasn't.
What was eventually happening was this:
* at startup, the wme qosinfo count field would be 0;
* it'd be parsed in ieee80211_parse_wmeparams();
* and it would be bumped (to say 10);
* .. and the WME queue parameters would be correctly parsed and set.
But then, when you restarted the assocation (eg hostap goes away and
comes back with the same qosinfo count field of 10, or if you
destroy the sta VIF and re-create it), the WME qosinfo count field -
which is associated not to the VIF, but to the main interface -
wouldn't be cleared, so the queue default parameters would be used
(which include no burst setting for the BE queue) and would remain
that way until the hostap qosinfo count field changed, or the STA
was actually rebooted.
This fix simply cleares the wme capability field (which has the count
field) to 0, forcing it to be reset by the next received beacon.
Thanks go to Milu for finding it and helping me track down what was
going on, and Bernard Schmidt for working through the net80211 and
WME specific magic.
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