mwlwifi

mac80211 driver for the Marvell 88W8x64 802.11ac chip

Building mwlwifi With OpenWrt/LEDE

See building for OpenWrt

Special Considerations

• After driver 10.3.0.17-20160603, [MAX-MPDU-7991] should be removed from vht_capab command of hostapd.

• Hostpad must include the following commit for 160 MHz operation:

  commit 03a72eacda5d9a1837a74387081596a0d5466ec1
  Author: Jouni Malinen <[email protected]>
  Date:   Thu Dec 17 18:39:19 2015 +0200
  
  VHT: Add an interoperability workaround for 80+80 and 160 MHz channels
  
  Number of deployed 80 MHz capable VHT stations that do not support 80+80
  and 160 MHz bandwidths seem to misbehave when trying to connect to an AP
  that advertises 80+80 or 160 MHz channel bandwidth in the VHT Operation
  element. To avoid such issues with deployed devices, modify the design
  based on newly proposed IEEE 802.11 standard changes.
  
  This allows poorly implemented VHT 80 MHz stations to connect with the
  AP in 80 MHz mode. 80+80 and 160 MHz capable stations need to support
  the new workaround mechanism to allow full bandwidth to be used.
  However, there are more or less no impacted station with 80+80/160
  capability deployed.
  
  Signed-off-by: Jouni Malinen [email protected]
  
  Note: After hostapd package 2016-06-15, this commit is already included.
  

• In order to let STA mode to support 160 MHz operation, mac80211 package should be 2016-10-08 or later.

• WiFi device does not use HT rates when using TKIP as the encryption cipher. If you want to have good performance, please use AES only.

• DTS parameters for mwlwifi driver (pcie@X,0):

  #Disable 2g band
  marvell,2ghz = <0>;
  
  #Disable 5g band
  marvell,5ghz = <0>;
  
  #Specify antenna number, default is 4x4. For WRT1200AC, you must set these values to 2x2.
  marvell,chainmask = <4 4>;
  
  #Specify external power table. If your device needs external power table, you must provide the power table via this parameter, otherwise the Tx power will be pretty low.
  marvell,powertable

  To see if your device needs/accepts an external power table or not, run the following:

  cat /sys/kernel/debug/ieee80211/phy0/mwlwifi/info

  You should see a line in the results which looks like the following:

  power table loaded from dts: no

  If it is "no", it does not allow you to load external power table (for newer devices due to FCC regulations). If it is "yes", you must provide power table in DTS file (for older devices).

• Changing interrupt to different CPU cores:

  #Use CPU0:
  echo 1 > /proc/irq/irq number of phy0 or phy1/smp_affinity
  
  #Use CPU1:
  echo 2 > /proc/irq/irq number of phy0 or phy1/smp_affinity

• Note for DFS of WRT3200ACM (88W8964):

  All WRT3200ACM devices are programmed with device power table. Mwlwifi driver will base on region code to set country code for your device and it will not allow you to change country code. There are another wifi (phy2) on WRT3200ACM which is not mwlwifi. It will allow you to change country code. Under this case, country code setting will be conflicted and it will let DFS can't work.

  There are two ways to resolve this problem:

  • Please don't change country code and let mwlwifi set it for you.

  • Remove phy2. Under this case, even though you change country code, mwlwifi will reject it. Because phy2 is not existed, country code setting won't be conflicted. To do this, run the following commands (for OpenWrt/LEDE):

    opkg remove kmod-mwifiex-sdio
    opkg remove mwifiex-sdio-firmware
    reboot

  The better way is let mwlwifi set country code for you.

Replacing mwlwifi on a Current OpenWrt/LEDE Build

1. Establish a symbolic link to your working mwlwifi directory with current mwlwifi package name under directory "dl":

   ls -l mwlwifi*

   You should see something like the following:

   lrwxrwxrwx 1 dlin dlin      48  mwlwifi-10.3.2.0-20170110 -> /home/dlin/home2/projects/github/mwlwifi
   
   -rw-r--r-- 1 dlin dlin 4175136  mwlwifi-10.3.2.0-20170110.tar.xz

2. Back up original mwlwifi package and tar your working mwlwifi to replace original mwlwifi package:

   tar Jcvf mwlwifi-10.3.2.0-20170110.tar.xz mwlwifi-10.3.2.0-20170110/.

3. You can use make V=s to build the whole image or make V=s package/kernel/mwlwifi/compile to build mwlwifi package. The generated whole image or mwlwifi package can be found under directory "bin".

Due to package version being the same as previous one, you need to add option --force-reinstall when you use opkg to update mwlwifi package on your device.

Monitor interface for debug

1. Create moinitor interface mon0:

   iw wlan0/wlan1 interface add mon0 type monitor
   ifconfig mon0 up

2. Use tcpdump to dump dhcp packets:

   tcpdump -vvvi mon0 -n port 67 and port 68

3. Use tcpdump to dump icmp packets:

   tcpdump -vvvi mon0 icmp