and I've had some time to improve my test setup and
hopefully have better access to a mvm card for testing.
If all that's lacking is a few NICs then I'm sure we/I can help out with
that :)
Thanks, but as you suspected the NICs are the smallest problem...
I've simply delayed setting up a good lab far too long. So prior to
shifting the focus to drivers I have to remedy that somehow.
Not really relevant here, but if you want to know what I plan for the
future here my thoughts on it. If not you better skip that section:-)
Current plan is, to get one (ideally two, depending on price) mini PCs
(amd64) with m.2 slots, good antennas and one or two matching Intel AC
9260 cards.
Additionally I want to get rid of the whitelist in my development
notebook by flashing coreboot, opening the path to install a minipci to
m.2 adapter mount a second/third Intel 9260 card.
The core boot flash rollout is imminent, just do not want to risk the
system by soldering wires to the mainboard till the generic support is
sorted out. If that goes wrong I could brick my main system and lose
access to my dvm card, but no risk no fun:-)
With that setup and using AC-9260 in all devices I'll have near-perfect
setup to test and observe AC-9260 and can simply swap out cards to test
and and maybe also get working after (hopefully) getting AC-9260
Extended Key ID "certified" as reference implementation.
With three stations I can then try my hand at the still open mesh
support for Extended Key ID, but that should wpa_supplicant only.
That said the initial heavy lifting is done. I'm still amazed I get that
off the ground and working end2end with comparable ease. While there is
still much work left the structures are all in place and it's now mainly
closing the gaps.
I currently plan stick to the project a bit langer getting at least some
intel cards and ath9k working, finalize the already existing Extended
Key ID and PTK0 rekey patches and also update wireshark again.
I suspect I'll need at least one year for that in the best case,
potentially much longer.
I already have three bugs/issues flagged for analysis. Nothing really
relevant for the generic support but all three itching enough I'll plan
to look into them:
1) Wrong time stamps with at least iwlwifi when using monitor in
parallel to the normal connection for outgoing MPDUs (probably mac80211
issue, )
2) Probably: Wpa_supplicant scan list is flushed too often, preventing
fast reconnects
3) Wireshark can't handle Extended Key IDs decoding (and decoding should
get at least some other generic improvements
Chances are I'll be busy with coreboot for some time and then
finding/setting up some mini PC(s). That's nothing I've had any need for
so far and suitable systems with M.2 slots with at least two external
antennas are hard to find. (So I may end up mounting external antennas
to the system myself.)
To continue I primarily need another Extended Key ID AP, ideally able to
support NATIVE and COMPAT mode. Having a second device (or maybe just
second M.2 card in the same one?) for sniffing nice.
Finding a really good sniffer able to also capture A-MPDU frames
including control frames would be awesome. All the so-called good
sniffing USB sticks I got my hands on crap even for sniffing normal
frames compared to my built-in dvm card nobody seems to suggest for
sniffing...
Full-speed sniffing to observe a rekey during load is hardly a common
use case and I suspect usb interface alone an indication the card won't
be able to handle it well. And some things like the cleartext packet
leaks only becomes visible at higher speeds. (Which btw also need a
follow up. My crypt skills are not the best, but with my current
understanding I'm quite sure a retransmit of a previously encrypted
frame in the clear text gives away the TK key for all other frames
encrypted with the same TK.)
So plenty of work and reason to get a better test environment set up:-)
I hope the newer mvm cards will be as good as my old mvm card and when
using the same card in the AP, sta and sniffer able to get basically
every frame as long as the sniffer has the best antennas.
If someone here has a suggestion what works for I would appreciate some
pointers here:-) Don't want sink too much money at it but if it's
something around 300€ or so I could simply start with one and decide
later if I really need a second one. Non-amd64 systems would also be ok,
but it must at least work with vanilla kernels and something like
Debian. I'm wasted enough time of porting my patches for each test and
keep them in sync.
If someone is willing to donate a suitable test system I would not say
no, but I'll plan to finish that with private funds also.
I probably should work on the new AP, but then I always wanted to test
coreboot and finding out my notebook is now supported is too alluring to
resist;-)
I also have tested patch for iwldvm using the Compat mode and I think
mvm cards will also work with that.
No they don't, no firmware is available for that.
So far I only looked at the dvm part of iwlwifi with only minutes spend
on mvm to port the NATIVE solution from dvm.
:)
Are you saying that mvm cards can't seamless switch a RX/TX key to TX
only one? mvm seems to support SW crypto as needed and switching RX/TX
to TX keys is the only other requirement for COMPAT mode.
No, sorry. I misread your statement. I thought you were saying "mvm
cards will also work with iwldvm" rather than "mvm cards will also work
with compat mode" :-)
I think they all should just be made to work in native mode, the
firmware basically supports this as you found, there must be some small
bugs.
Agree. And with your statements that it already should work and the
option to get ucode updates I like our chances:-) With some luck it
could even work and I made some error the first time. I'll give that a
second look with what I have at hand soon. But after bombing you with
mails for what feels like most of the weekend I'll postpone that for now:-)
As mentioned above I'm currently aiming for two or three Intel AC-9260
cards for the next development round. It's seems to be the most modern
card and the price difference between the cards is irrelevant compared
to both efforts and costs to get the cards working in two or three
devices. If you thing another card would be better for development I'll
just use that one instead...
Alexander
Alexander
