Re: [Madwifi-users] Survey: What are you using MadWifi for, and why?

Hi folks,

I'm glad you are asking.

Where I use it?

Almost everywhere, but 99% of the time in ahdemo or IBSS mode. For the 
Villagetelco project / Mesh-Potato VOIP mesh nodes that will begin 
deployment in South Africa soon. Production of the units (beta series) 
will start now. These are based on a Atheros AR2317 SoC chip and have a 
FXS port. You can plug your old analog handset into the FXS port and do 
phone calls over a layer 3 mesh with Asterisk and the B.a.t.m.a.n. mesh 
routing protocol.

Note that we are using Openwrt and Madwifi with numerous patches from 
Felix Fietkau. Guys from the Freifunk community (Felix Fietkau, Bruno 
Randolf, Sven Ola-Tücke) have been working on this driver for a long time.

Ath5k is not yet an option since it is lacking support for this SoC. 
Also I'm missing many features - no ahdemo mode, can't set 
multicast/broadcast rate.

However there are a few permanent bugs in Madwifi - fragmentation is 
still broken, and Madwifi IBSS nodes do send too many beacons. The 
mechanism that avoids sending redundant beacons is just not implemented 
AFAIK.

Linux wireless development has done a excellent job - with recent 
kernels IBSS mode works nicely with a multitude of drivers. Actually I 
have seen problems in ath9k station mode while IBSS mode worked rock 
solid. :-) The sad days of serious IBSS bugs for Linux are over. Who 
needs point-to-multipoint mode if you can have multipoint-to-multipoint 
mode, anyway?!  ;-)

However there is only a minimum set of features supported by Linux 
wireless. For VOIP/mesh ahdemo mode and the possibility of setting the 
broadcast rate are important. (I want to limit the range and airtime 
consumption of mesh protocol broadcasts. No response to probe requests. 
Beacons are a bandwidth waste, particularly at basic rate)

So I guess for the applications that I'm working on I'll stick to 
Madwifi until the Atheros 802.11abg chipsets phase out.

Cheers,
Elektra

 

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