Atheros AR5212 poor connection speed

Hi Christiansen,

Thanks for all the great testing and information you provided. I've since opened a bug upstream for you as well. If you can, please subscribe yourself to that the upstream bug and follow up with any questions/comments posted by any upstream developers in that bug.

http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14511

Note, you made need to first create an account with bugzilla.kernel.org if you don't have one already in order to subscribe to the upstream bug.

Hi Leann,

Thanks for all the work you have put into the bug-handeling until now, I will subscribe to the upstream bug as soon as possible, and hopefully later tonight. I hope that all the testing could lead to a solution, as the ath5k never have been working with this type of Lenovo/IBM adapter - checked with other distros for the past 2 or 3 kernel releases too. I'm pretty sure that the adapter is widely used, as the adapter is one of the adapters used in a bunch of newer ThinkPads according to www.thinkwiki.org.

Lucid Alpha 2 (kernel 2.6.32-10.14) is also affected by this bug.

Lucid Alpha 3 (kernel 2.6.32-10.14) still suffering, and now even only connects to an wireless AP (tested Cisco. Linksys, 3COM) in very rear cases.
Meanwhile bugs keeps coming in on launchpad and even more people continues to rapport in on bug #461419 for this, in ThinkPads, widely used adapter.

  Ethernet controller [0200]: Atheros Communications Inc. AR5212 802.11abg NIC [168c:1014] (rev 01)
  Subsystem: IBM Device [1014:058a]

Nothing much seems to happen on the related upstream kernel bug, and compiling latest compat-wireless drivers unfortunately doesn't seem to change things either.

This bug is preventing my friend from moving to Ubuntu. :(

@ashgtx
what adapter (sudo lspci -vvnn) are you using and what channel are channel/frequency are the AP you are trying to connect to running ?
from a terminal run and find your SSID, if its broadcasting the SSID : nm-tool
if it's not broadcasting, but slightingly more complicated as you need to know the MAC addess : iwlist wlan0 scan

If you are running above channel 6 or 2437 Mhz on the AP, then you could try changing the APs channel below 7 (if you have admin access). This has solved my problem on a couple of installations, since this is a known bug in the ath5k module, which doesn't seem to get much attention in the upstream linux-kernel-bugs 14511 (see the top of this bug for a link).

This bug is solved by using the upstream compat-wireless-2010-04-19.tar.bz2, and also works fine using compat-wireless-2010-05-22.tar.bz2.

Any chance that this upstream update could get into Lucid updates somehow ?

@Christiansen

I've managed to compile and load madwifi after blacklisting ath5k. This solves the problem. For now.

Will this bug be rectified if I update to the latest kernel?

@ashgtx

Nope, madwifi is out of K/Ubuntu for good I think, and ath5k despite all the bug are the one non-hackers are bound to from the 9.10 release. The good news is that the ath5k module in compat-wireless-2010-04-19.tar.bz2 from: http://wireless.kernel.org/download/compat-wireless-2.6/
is easier and faster to compile than madwifi (just remember to do a "./scripts/driver-select ath5k" first), and that this particular bug (and probably many other ath5k's) finally been solved.

Right now the only way to get this updated driver without compiling, is to use the K/Ubuntu mainline and precompiled 2.6.36 RC1 kernel image (and the 2 header) packages for your CPU architecture from: http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v2.6.35-rc1-lucid/
The driver will according to the upstream kernel guys never come to the 2.6.32 kernel, which Lucid is based upon.

What I think we_could_hope_for, is that someone will put this an updated compat-wireless stack in the repository as the "linux-backports-modules-wireless-lucid-generic" package (right now referencing to a NOT fixed/updated "linux-backports-modules-wireless-2.6.32-22-generic" package).

I got tired of the problems with ath5k, such as freezing my computer (90% sure ath5k was the culprit), network manger roaming to none etc. and installed the windows driver under ndiswrapper. Worked like a charm -- why didn't I think of this immediately?

Instructions in the last post in the following thread: http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-429537.htm

Maybe this can be of some help to someone else as well.

(Sorry for crossposting this comment to several discussion threads.)

Please try installing the latest linux-backports-modules-wireless package. It currently includes driver updates from 2.6.34, which may include a fix for this issue.

Thanks!

Nope, the modules that fix this particular bug will first be included in the 2.6.35 kernel - please have a look at the last comment on the upstream kernel bug.

BTW. I've been running the Ubuntus mainstream kernel 2.6.35 RC1 and RC 3 on Lucid for a while and they solve this bug. On another box I've been using the compat-wireless dated 2010-04-19 and 2010-06-15, both work but the latest have absolutely best roaming capabilities.

This bug was filed against a series that is no longer supported and so is being marked as Won't Fix. If this issue still exists in a supported series, please file a new bug.

This change has been made by an automated script, maintained by the Ubuntu Kernel Team.