Arch Linux

splitbrain

Member

Registered: 2008-03-26

Posts: 11

ath5k very slow on EeePC 701

Hi,

I'm having trouble with the ath5k driver on my Asus EeePC 701. WiFi generally works but is painfully slow. Even if I'm right next to the router and iwconfig shows 100% signal strength I only get about 80K/s (when connect via cable I get about 1.5M/s).

From googling around it seems several others (on different distributions) have similar problems with the ath5k driver. So I wanted to switch back to the madwifi drivers  but they seem (no longer) to support the AR5BXB63 chip in my EeePC? I'm getting the following message in dmsg:

ath_pci 0000:01:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 18 (level, low) -> IRQ 18
ath_pci 0000:01:00.0: setting latency timer to 64
ath_pci: HAL doesn't support MAC revision 0xe2
ath_pci 0000:01:00.0: PCI INT A disabled

So my questions are:

  * do others experience the same problems?
  * am I doing something wrong with the madwifi drivers?
  * are there any alternative drivers I could try?
  * am I maybe just missing some config?

Andi

here's some version data:

$ uname -a
Linux dinky 2.6.29-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Fri Apr 17 12:46:01 UTC 2009 i686 Intel(R) Celeron(R) M processor 900MHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

$ modinfo ath5k
filename:       /lib/modules/2.6.29-ARCH/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/ath5k/ath5k.ko
version:        0.6.0 (EXPERIMENTAL)

$ pacman -Q madwifi
madwifi 0.9.4.3952-4

$ pacman -Q kernel26
kernel26 2.6.29.1-4

splitbrain

Member

Registered: 2008-03-26

Posts: 11

Re: ath5k very slow on EeePC 701

This seems to be solved now... it turned out that there seemed to be some link issue. Even though iwconfig said 100% signal strength there seemed to be some interference with neighboring WLANs. Switching to a different channel somehow solved the issue for me.

What still puzzles me is that other devices (like my iPhone) seemed not to have any trouble.