On 1/31/2024 8:28 PM, James Prestwood wrote:
Hi Baochen,
As you may have guessed I don't _really_ know what I'm doing. When I
got this working with ath10k I saw monitor device was being used in
order to receive probes, and did the same for multicast action frames
and it "just worked". The frames themselves were still being received
on the station device. I attempted to mimic the changes with ath11k.
The end goal here is just that, be able to receive multicast action
frames on the station device which currently does not work. I'm only
seeing unicast frames when i enable RX debugging. The driver support
for multicast action RX in the kernel for this is basically zero. An
extended feature flag was added by Jouni when he added support to
ath9k, I added limited ath10k support for a variant I tested, and I'd
like to do the same for ath11k as we are transitioning to the WCN6855.
OK, so you are testing this with latest ath.git, without any private
changes, and it doesn't work, right? Could you share your test steps?
Basically how are you sending multicast action frames from AP/peer,
and how to check if that frame received or not (I am assuming by
checking RX logs)?
Yep I'm on the latest ath.git, and with no changes apart from that MSI
vector hack to get it working with vfio-pci.
The way I'm testing this is using IWD with DPP PKEX. Building IWD should
be relatively straight forward, very few dependencies. This will also
include iwctl which is IWD's command line utility:
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/network/wireless/iwd.git/
I have two devices, the configurator device (device A, ath11k) is what
should be able to receive the multicast action frames. The enrollee
device (device B) can use probably any hardware as sending multicast
action frames should be supported. IWD will not start a DPP PKEX
configurator without EXT_FEATURE_MULTICAST_REGISTRATIONS set but if you
enable RX logging that should be good enough to see if the frame is
making it to the ath11k driver itself. Once multicast RX is supported we
would need to add that extended feature to ath11k, or at least the
tested variant. If you want, you can hack in that feature bit and start
a configurator but if your able to get the muticast RX working I can
probably take it from there:
1. Enable RX logging on device A
2. Start IWD on device A
iwd -d
3. Connect to a network on device A
iwctl station <wlan> connect <ssid>
<enter passphrase>
# Optional: start a configurator. This won't work without the ext
feature set
iwctl pkex <wlan> configure secret123
4. Start IWD on device B, do not connect.
iwd -d
5. Start DPP PKEX as an enrollee on device B:
iwctl pkex <wlan> enroll secret123
On device B you should see IWD first scan to establish nearby
APs/frequencies, then begin iterating those frequencies and sending a
multicast action frame.
Hi James, I reproduced this issue following your guide. From the advise
of firmware team, a new flag is needed. With that flag, I did see the
multicast action frame in device A logging. Before I proceed, want to
clarify something: that frame is only seen after device A triggers a
scan (I triggered it manually using iw, not IWD itself because IWD not
working on device A due to unknown errors), if no scan no frame seen. I
am not sure if this behavior is expected so now checking with internal
team on it.
So there comes a question: will IWD triggers scan on device A in order
to receive that frame?
Thanks,
James
And help is much appreciated, and I'm happy to put in the work its
just a steep learning curve coupled with the fact that any FW level
communication is proprietary. I really just need a nudge in the right
direction.
Thanks,
James
Thanks,
James
Thanks,
James
