Saturday, November 26, 2011

FreeBSD on the TP-Link TL-WR1043nd!

I've now included (almost) all of the support needed to run FreeBSD natively on the TP-Link TL-WR1043nd. It's a 3-antenna, 2x2 stream 2.4ghz 802.11n AP which you can get for under AUD $100.

It supports hostap mode (which is what I bet most of you want to use) and I'm currently using it at home alongside my Ubiquiti Routerstation Pro based hostap (which is what I use to test out all the other pre-11n and 11n NICs that I currently own.)

I currently get around 50mbit TCP throughput - but I leave full FreeBSD-HEAD debugging on. I'm sure I can push the unit closer to 100mbit. (Compare to the Routerstation Pro + AR9160 hostap - where I routinely get 160mbit of TCP throughput.)

What works (read: what I've tested):
  • Ethernet (at least the WAN port);
  • Wireless - 802.11bgn - 20/40mhz operation as well as legacy operation (and both, if that's what you need);
  • Serial console - if you've soldered in one.

The firmware image stores the configuration in a 64k flash partition which is read upon boot. You can modify files in /etc and then save these to flash via "cfg_save".

What isn't supported:
  • The onboard switch - so I believe the only port available at the present moment is the WLAN port;
  • The GPIO lines aren't being configured, so the WLAN, status and USB/QSS buttons don't function.
I haven't tested out Multi-SSID mode yet. The earlier AR9130 revisions have some issues with multi-SSID mode and handling block-ack tracking, so I _think_ I'll need to somehow disable aggregation on the second and later VAP interfaces. Just keep that in mind if you're tinkering.

Further details about the hardware and how to build the software for yourself can be found here in my FreeBSD wifi development project wiki.

No, I won't (yet) be putting up firmware images for people to test. Things are changing quite rapidly and there's no easy way to reflash a unit once you've placed FreeBSD on it - you'll need to have added a serial console to the device.

FreeBSD 802.11n update: 27 November 2011.

I've merged in most of the reset related fixes from my git tree into FreeBSD-HEAD. This means that normal resets (eg stuck beacon, calibration resets, etc) shouldn't drop frames any longer.

Frames are still dropped during things like channel/operation mode changes and channel scanning (which does do a channel change.) I'll have to look into that at a later stage. If you're using this in station mode you will likely need to disable background scanning or your aggregation sessions may occasionally drop. You'll have random messages logged when frames are dropping during a flush or reset, so just check your system dmesg log for anything from the ath driver.

I'll be next working on correctly handling failed/filtered frames and then adding some transition stuff to net80211 so the TIM/ATIM bitmaps can be kept correctly up to date. This should fix some of the power saving issues that I'm sure exist.

Unfortunately transmitting BAR frames is still quite a bit off. There's a lot more tidying up that I'd like to do before I start down the path of handling BAR TX, including trying to figure out how to better handle packet transmission and reception when the NIC is off-channel (eg when doing a background channel scan.)

I also have a long list of things I'd like to do to the rate control code and all the surrounding code which sets up rates and creates aggregates. The code I ported/wrote is a little too verbose and duplicate-y for me. That likely will occur after the christmas break.


Wednesday, November 16, 2011

FreeBSD is now doing (even more) 802.11n..

I held off merging in my 802.11n work as much as possible but I decided that I'd like to get it done before the end of the year. Even though 9.0-RELEASE is still around the corner, I decided that it would be better to merge in what I have into -HEAD and then tidy that up then wait for what could be a few more months.

So, it's in there, bugs and all, supporting both station and hostap mode. No, wds, adhoc, mesh and TDMA aren't currently supported (I have enough bugs to worry about for the time being, without trying to debug the other operating modes. But I'd like to.)

What works:
  • TX and RX aggregation!
  • The rest of the 802.11n negotiation stuff, mostly thanks to Bernhard Schmidt who fixed up a lot of the net80211 quirks.
  • Lots of ANI changes which hopefully make noisy environments more stable.

What doesn't yet work:

  • Interface resets cause frames to be dropped from the RX and TX queues. This messes up aggregation and causes sessions to hang. I'm fixing that up in a git branch at the moment.
  • BAR TX - I'll implement BAR TX soon - it's just tricky to get right.
  • Filtered frames - ie, TX failed frames from the hardware. Instead of the current method of "always try", the hardware supports failing the current and subsequent frames in a set. That way a hostap seeing a station going into power saving mode can quickly abort all TX frames to said station and then only retransmit them when the station indicates it's again awake. If I don't do this then the hardware will constantly fail a lot of frames, causing BAR frames to be TXed when they likely shouldn't be.

But it's enough to try. So if you have an AR5416, AR9160, AR9220, AR9280, AR9285, AR9227 or AR9287, give it a whirl. If you have a pre-11n NIC then please, give it a go too. I'd like to ensure that the hardware support for earlier chipsets hasn't broken.

If you'd like to use this in production on a hostap then please keep in mind that power saving support isn't entirely functional and featured, so stations which go into frequent power saving mode may have some performance issues. I'll tinker with this some more soon.

Finally, thank you very much to Hobnob, Inc. for sponsoring this work and Qualcomm Atheros for providing me source code, documentation and assistance in understanding how all of this works.

Saturday, October 29, 2011

Sitting in a hotel, getting stuck beacons..

I'm sitting in a hotel here in Sydney, wondering if Qantas will allow my flight to happen on Monday, when I discover my 11bg AP interface here is going a bit bezerk-o with the stuck beacons.

This isn't terribly good - I thought I had fixed all the stuck beacon issues! Apparently not.

It turns out that in this hotel room, overlooking St Martins Place, I can see a whole lot of random crap. And this includes a very persistent little wireless client:

[e8:06:88:8b:23:57] discard probe_req frame, ssid mismatch: "Crime Prevention"
[e8:06:88:8b:23:57] discard probe_req frame, ssid mismatch: "Boingo Hotspot"
[e8:06:88:8b:23:57] discard probe_req frame, ssid mismatch: "Belkin.44FD"
[e8:06:88:8b:23:57] discard probe_req frame, ssid mismatch: "101-108"
[e8:06:88:8b:23:57] discard probe_req frame, ssid mismatch: "Willkommen bei La Maison du Pain"
[e8:06:88:8b:23:57] discard probe_req frame, ssid mismatch: "WLAN-E36697"
[e8:06:88:8b:23:57] discard probe_req frame, ssid mismatch: "FRITZ!BoxWLAN7240 HB"
[e8:06:88:8b:23:57] discard probe_req frame, ssid mismatch: "Vineyard Square Hotel"

Sunday, September 25, 2011

I know this is old..

From if_wi.c in FreeBSD:

* Lucent WaveLAN/IEEE 802.11 PCMCIA driver.
* Original FreeBSD driver written by Bill Paul
* Electrical Engineering Department
* Columbia University, New York City

From if_wi.c in OpenBSD:

* Lucent WaveLAN/IEEE 802.11 driver for OpenBSD.
* Originally written by Bill Paul
* Electrical Engineering Department
* Columbia University, New York City

Monday, September 12, 2011

FreeBSD vendor summit - November 2011; Sunnyvale, California

Since this doesn't seem to have gotten much notice - there's a FreeBSD vendor summit being held in Sunnyvale, California on the 3rd and 4th of November 2011. This is an opportunity for developers and vendors to share project direction and goals, collaborate on various projects, and likely hit each other with a big "why can't you do X" stick :-)

NetApp is sponsoring the event.

I'll be there with someone from Qualcomm Atheros, who will be presenting on Qualcomm/Atheros' open source direction and strategy. There'll likely be some (informal) discussion about how developers and vendors can sign up to their open source developer programme and obtain documentation/reference code for the Atheros wireless and embedded chipsets.

(This is what I've signed up to and it's been a huge help in getting Atheros 802.11n support up and going in FreeBSD.)

More details can be found here:

If you're a vendor using FreeBSD, or you're a vendor thinking about using FreeBSD in a project (wireless or otherwise) this mini-conference is just for you. Personally I'm interested in talking with the nvidia representative about trying to get some CUDA stuff going on FreeBSD.

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Wireless update - 802.11n development

A few of us have been working towards 802.11n support in FreeBSD. Bernhard Schmidt and I were hoping to get 802.11n support up to scratch before 9.0-RELEASE but a combination of timing constraints and work constraints has hampered things somewhat.

But that said, we the net80211 support for 802.11n is in a lot better shape than it was in previous releases. Bernhard has been working out the kinks in the intel driver (if_iwn) and has 802.11n support mostly stable for those NICs. Someone else has been working on if_ral 802.11n support and has had quite a bit of success there. And I've been working on if_ath/ath_hal support.

(As a side-note, I've ordered some Marvell if_mwl compatible NICs to do some testing with.)

The 802.11n support in the FreeBSD atheros driver is already mostly usable for testing - 802.11n TX and RX works, but 802.11n TX aggregation doesn't work. So if you'd like to test it out in 9.0-RELEASE, you can do this:

* build a kernel with "options ATH_ENABLE_11N";
* ifconfig wlan0 -ampdutx
* associate as per normal to an 802.11n network.

Your download speeds will be good (as RX aggregation works) but as TX aggregation doesn't, you won't be getting full speed.

Now, as for the current work I'm doing. I've been porting over (and reimplementing in places) the 802.11n TX aggregation support, based on a combination of the atheros reference/carrier codebases and what's filtered through to the Linux ath9k driver.

In short - so far, so good. There's a lot to do, but basic TX aggregation is working in both station and hostap mode. My current test setup is:
  • A routerstation pro with an AR9160 NIC, running locally built firmware (FreeBSD) in hostap mode;
  • An EEEPC 701 retrofitted with an AR9280 NIC, running FreeBSD, as a station;
  • My macbook pro (broadcom 802.11n) as a station.
So far it's performing well - 200mbit TX/RX UDP in 5ghz HT/40 2x2 stream mode; and 130-140mbit TX/RX TCP.

I'm currently doing the work in a FreeBSD user svn branch. The details are in the Wiki - . I currently have exactly one tester (AR5416 STA, AR9280 hostap) who is reporting excellent success. I'd obviously like a few more. :)

There's still a lot of work to be done before this can be merged into HEAD. I'm sorry to say it won't happen before 9.0-RELEASE as there are some upcoming net80211 changes which will be rather intrusive and a bit risky to throw into the release at this late stage. It may also be difficult to backport as some changes will break kernel ABI.

But don't let anyone tell you FreeBSD doesn't support 802.11n. 9.0-RELEASE may not have much support, but all the key pieces are there. Once the release has been cut, I'll do some chasing up to get the Intel, Marvell and Ralink 802.11n support updated. (If someone would like to take charge of the broadcom NIC drivers, please drop freebsd-wireless@ a line.)

The next 6 months will be very interesting in the FreeBSD 802.11 world. :)

Finally, none of this current work would've been possible without the support of the sponsor paying me to get FreeBSD's net80211 and ath support updated - Hobnob, Inc. They contacted me a few months ago to help work out kinks in the Atheros NIC they're using in FreeBSD and seem impressed enough by my work to sponsor general net80211/ath improvements which they'll likely roll into future products. So when you're using Atheros 802.11n hardware in FreeBSD and getting that nice 140-150mbit TCP throughput, please give them thanks. :)

And finally finally, Qualcomm Atheros and the Linux ath9k developers have been instrumental in this work. The documentation, reference code and general interactive discussions have allowed me to get all of this work done in such a short period of time. (Yes, I did say "Atheros", "Documentation" and "Source Code" there, in the context of open source. Honest.)

Wireless update - DFS wrapup

Now that the DFS work has been completed, tested and paid for, I guess I can now write about it.

The DFS work was sponsored by KBC Networks, a wireless product company based in the USA. The eventual aim is to integrate this DFS work into their mesh product. I can't talk any further about what's going on there, except to say that they very graciously allowed the FreeBSD work to be released back to the community.

So FreeBSD now has:

  • Updated DFS master (hostap) and DFS slave (station) support in net80211;
  • Updated regulatory domain entries for the USS ("FCC3");
  • Changes to the ath(4) driver to fix corner cases in DFS master and DFS slave modes.
All of this work is now in FreeBSD-HEAD and will be available in FreeBSD-9.0.

Future work will hopefully include DFS IBSS and DFS mesh functionality. This work didn't include 802.11n DFS - but that's not too difficult to do (hint: if someone would like the mini-project, please contact me!)

Along with that was a port of the Atheros radar detection code (from Fusion, their earlier carrier codebase) which is currently proprietary. The Linux wireless developers have been working towards DFS compliance for a while, but haven't yet integrated working radar detection into any drivers. So this was a good exercise in uncharted territory to see how difficult it would be.

It turns out that it wasn't terribly difficult at all. After spending a bit of time chasing down missing bits in the FreeBSD atheros HAL driver, the third party doing said radar code porting managed to get FreeBSD doing radar detection at the same level as the commercial firmware.

During this particular exercise we discovered a few things about the software radar detection, which I think the community at large should know about.

The process of getting a device FCC/ETSI certified is just that - the whole device. This includes the NIC, the internal cabling, the enclosure, the antenna(s) and any external cabling. Maybe even whether it's indoors or outdoors, I wasn't involved in that. This likely has repercussions for any open source DFS implementation - although the DFS machinery in a specific FreeBSD release could be certified, the software based radar matching code may need tuning for the specific hardware used. So it's likely that Linux/FreeBSD can't just publish a single "ath_dfs" source module that will work for all Atheros NICs - or even a single NIC. It's likely that things will need tuning based on how a given NIC is used, the environment it's intending to be used in, and a variety of other things I haven't even thought about yet.

So if/when this does occur, the open source wireless community (FreeBSD, Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonflyBSD, whatever..) will have to be responsible and not just simply run an "ath_dfs" radar module, assuming that it works. For complete, correct, certified behaviour, it's going to likely need the community to work with vendors and users in order to create "working, certified" combinations of hardware and software. So, if a vendor (call them U) wishes to release a new "SR-M" NIC, they could work with the open source wireless community to create a certified NIC+board+enclosure+antenna combination and publish a set of radar patterns and settings. They could leverage the proposed existing open source radar pattern matching code and simply add whatever configuration is needed. Users should then be responsible - they should only use the given radar dfs code with the correct setup. If they wish to run a modified setup, they should work with the vendor and upstream community to get things re-certified.

This way the DFS and radar pattern matching code is open source - what then changes is the radar patterns and configuration, which depends upon the NIC, cabling, antenna and environment.

For home users/developers, having a set of certified hardware combinations will make things easier for them.

For commercial vendors, if they adopt open-source FreeBSD or Linux on their platforms then (in an ideal world) they could get their equipment certified once (which as I note, they have to do anyway) and then publish the relevant radar patterns and configuration. The rest of the driver (including the radar pattern matching source and the general DFS support) would already be open source. Users can then use this when running their own kernel/distribution/OS on that platform.

I know this is all very fluffy and assumes that vendors/users act in a responsible, open manner. But I think this is what needs to occur if the open source community wishes to see stable, supported DFS regulatory compliance in their open source project.

To wrap this up, if you're a company wishing to leverage open source on their (Atheros) wireless platform and are interested in regulatory compliance, please drop me a line. I'll put you in contact with the relevant people inside Qualcomm Atheros to discuss how to best achieve this.

Saturday, July 30, 2011

FreeBSD: DFS update

I've spent the last few weeks sorting out the DFS support in FreeBSD. I've made some decent progress with it however there's still a long way to go. This has been paid work and I'm glad to see increasing interest in 802.11 support under FreeBSD.

I've debugged DFS channel switching behaviour in station and access point mode. This now functions correctly in both instances.

The ath driver now behaves "better" when doing a DFS channel change. The driver would change channels and wait for the first beacon to program the beacon timers - which are then used to signal when there's a lack of beacons (and thus net80211 marks the state as "SCAN" and begins hunting for another AP.) If a channel change occured to a channel that required a CAC (clear access check) and a radar event occured, a second channel switch would occur - and there'd never be any beacons on that channel. The NIC would sit there forever waiting to hear a first beacon that never came.

I've updated the FCC3 regulatory domain to include frequency bands that require DFS.

I've also introduced some radar device setup and event parsing code into the ath HAL layer which would allow an interested party to tinker with radar detection/classification code on the AR5212 series NICs. I don't have permission to commit the radar frame decoding code for the 11N NICs - I'm working on this.

Finally, I've introduced a radar detection layer - called "ath_dfs" - which currently does nothing (hence the only module is "dfs_null".) This provides all the hooks needed to do radar detection, classification and signaling.

Now, what I haven't done:
  • The project also includes working porting the radar classification code and getting it to work. This unfortunately won't be open sourced. I'm going to try and get as much of the radar hardware setup and radar event frame parsing code committed to FreeBSD so an interested party can begin tinkering with this.
  • I haven't yet ported a lot of the "channel interference" support. It's there, but I haven't really fleshed it out to be useful and then used it.
  • There's no DFS support for 11N yet - in particular, 11N HT/40 channels aren't correctly marked as "interference" or "radar"; 11N channels also aren't scanned for during DFS channel selection. That's a later project.
  • I need to extend things a bit to handle the weather radar stuff when doing DFS - the ETSI requirements include different channel quiet/scan times.
  • There's no support in net80211 (yet) for the DFS, TPC and Quiet elements. This is going to be required for a fully compliant DFS implementation.
  • I've not investigated implementing/fixing up the DFS support for IBSS and mesh modes.
However, even though there are shortcomings and some missing support in the DFS support, FreeBSD-9.0 will support DFS STA mode well enough to correctly obey instructions from a DFS-compliant access point.

Monday, July 11, 2011

Unintentional side-effects - IPv4/IPv6 load balancing..

Here's a fun one:




Lusca update: IPv6 server work is now working

I'm now using the Lusca IPv6 branch for browsing both IPv4 and IPv6 sites.

There's a bunch of little things to update and test, including testing the neighbor selection, peer and ICP code. It's still not yet doing transparent interception or TPROXY - that'll be among the last thing to work on. Finally, there's a bunch of connection timeout handling code which currently is being ignored - there's no convenient place to attach a timeout handler now since the file descriptor isn't created up front; it's created only once the DNS resolution is complete.

My main focus at the moment is testing and verifying the peer, neighbor selection and ICP code out.

But yes, it is actually working!

Thursday, July 7, 2011

Lusca development update - IPv6 is almost working

Now that I've (hopefully!) completely finished with university, I can get back into using my hard-earned money from Xenion to get more Lusca development done. (And yes, I'll also be doing wireless development too, fear not.)

The IPv6 branch is a bit messy at the moment, but it's almost able to handle IPv6 server requests.

The problem? The existing code which handles connecting to remote hosts (ie, src/comm.c) doesn't "know" about IPv6. It assumes all sockets are IPv4 and that all hostnames which are returned are also IPv4.

There's unfortunately a lot of dirty code in there - commReuseFD() is the main culprit and a good example of this. The 30 second version - since the commConnectStart() API assumes the socket is already created before the connect() occurs, any "connect retry" (for multiple hostnames and multiple attempts at the same end-host) requires the socket to be closed and recreated. But the FD has to stay the same. So commReuseFD() manually creates a new FD, makes it look like the old FD, then calls dup2() to get it into the same FD as the old one.

The "Correct" Fix is to modify the API to not take an FD, but to return an FD on successful connect() to the remote destination. There's some problems with this though, most notably in the request forwarding layer where the FD is created and comm close handlers are assigned before the connection is attempted. I need to make sure that there's no code which calls comm_close() on the active connection whilst connect() is going on - as said code expects the FD to be valid and assigned by this point.

The "Dirty" fix is to modify commConnectStart() and commReuseFD() to check the FD address family and destroy/create a "new" socket with the correct address family.

The "Problem" is that the code allows the outgoing address to be specified, both for transparent interception (source address spoofing) and to be set via an ACL match. Since IPv4 and IPv6 addresses are now possible, the API will have to be modified to handle this case.

What I'm likely going to do is something inspired by Squid-3. I'll teach the forwarding layer about "try v4 destinations" and "try v6 destinations". The administrator can then configure whether to try v4 or v6 destinations first. Only one outgoing address has to be provided - either "v4" or "v6"; and commConnectStart() will only try connecting to IP addresses that match the family of the outgoing address. That way if a host resolves to a mix of v4 and v6 addresses, they'll be tried in a "v4" group, then a "v6" group (or vice versa.) It's a bit dirty, but it's likely doable in the short-term.

In the long term, I'd like to fix the API up to be less messy and return an FD, rather than take an existing FD and abuse that. But that can come later.

Friday, June 17, 2011

Implementing 11n TX aggregation, why it's not so easy..

The only real missing bit from the initial 11n support for ath(4) in FreeBSD is now TX aggregation. This is also quite a tricky thing to do right, because (like everything related to these Atheros NICs) it's all done in software.

I'm about half way through the first part - implementing per-node, per-TID software queues. Since A-MPDU sessions are implemented using TIDs (although in net80211 they're linked to WME access classes (AC), hm!) traffic for each TID has to be individually managed.

The basic premise is quite simple. Frames are queued based on the destination node and TID. Non-QoS frames to a unicast destination (ie, a known station) go to the "non-QoS TID" (TID 16 in FreeBSD's net80211 stack.) Multicast frames go to the software-driven multicast/content-after-beacon (cabq) queue. Then a separate task handles de-queuing packets form these queues and queuing them to the hardware.

The reality however is a little more difficult than that.

Firstly, frames are queued from multiple contexts. The most obvious is the per-interface queue (ie wlanX). These may run in parallel and target the same hardware, so now I need to add locking to the per-node structure. Previously this wasn't (much) of a problem since the TX code simply directly dispatched to the hardware, and these queues are correctly locked. However now there's software-driven queues (which need new locks) along with some more per-node state. That all needs locking.

Next, the rate control code wasn't at all locked. I've begun wrapping them in per-node locks. Making sure I get this correct isn't easy.

Then there's the question of marking nodes and TIDs that have traffic to send. Right now that's done by adding each node to a linked list of "ready nodes". I then check all the TIDs for that node and dequeue what packets I have to. It's ugly code, but it works well enough for testing. I'll finish off implementing what ath9k and the Atheros reference code does (ie, maintaining both a "node" and "TID" linked list, so I can directly walk which TIDs need walking), but there's implications here for getting "QoS" right. (Ie, which order do you dequeue packets? How many do you dequeue from which queue in order for things to be "fair" ?) I'm going to leave all of these questions unanswered for now (as they're not handled in the current code anyway) and hope someone else steps up to it!

At this point I now have a mostly-clean (for values of "clean") implementation of per-node, per-TID software queues. I'm still in the process of tidying all of this up in preparation to commit to -HEAD before I begin the aggregation code. I'll cover that in a moment.

Then there's handling the aggregation session stuff.

Firstly, there's handling the ADDBA exchange (ie, establishing an A-MPDU session.) When this is done, any unicast traffic pending to that node/TID needs to be paused and kept around until the ADDBA request/response occurs. This is known as "pausing" the queue. I've a hack in place to do this and will implement a correct "pause" API soon to clean it up.

Next there's handling packets already queued to the hardware. This crept up on me without warning.

Firstly - a little background. The ADDBA exchange establishes the initial sequence number and window size to use as the "window" for subsequent data exchanges. After that, any packets being queued to the destination must fall within this window (typically say 64 sequence numbers long.) The window stays a fixed size, but the window itself slides along when TX packets are successfully completed. Since packets may be lost at any time (whether aggregate or not), the window doesn't move until the sequence numbers at the beginning of the window are successfully received.

So for example, say my window begins at "0", my window size is "4" and the station sends 4 packets with sequence numbers "0", "1", "2", "3". If I receive all four packets correctly and thus send back a block-ACK indicating this, the new window position will begin at "4". I can then send packets "4", "5", "6" and "7". I can't send "8", even if I have it in my queue.

But say the other end only received "0", "1" and "3". "2" wasn't received, so I have to retransmit it. I can only advance the window to "2". I can't advance it to "3", since I didn't receive "2". I could advance it to "1", but that'd be pointless as I've already received it. So in this instance, both the station and access point would advance the window position to "2" and the station would then retransmit "2". If it's coded correctly, it could transmit "2", "4", "5". It can't transmit "6", as that's outside the window size of 4 packets. It could just retransmit "2" if it wanted to and not the others. In fact, it could transmit "4", "5" and "2" - the receiver would then be responsible for re-ordering the packets and only passing them up to the network layer once all the packets in the correct order are available.

Finally, if I don't receive "2" (say I just can't seem to transmit it), the STA need to do a few things. It first has to pause the queue so no further packets are queued to the hardware. At this point, packets may be queued to the hardware, but they'll be for sequence numbers greater than "2" but still within the block-ack window. Once the hardware has finished completing packets (successfully or not), it needs to send a "BAR" frame to the access point to establish a new starting point for the sequence number window. In this instance it could set it to "3", but what if "3" was already in the hardware queue and was successfully transmitted? That would confuse the hell out of the other end. So it looks at the last successfully transmitted sequence number was, then sends the "BAR" with a starting sequence number 1 after that.

So, if "2" came back as having failed too many times, but "3" and "4" were in the hardware TX queue, the driver will pause the queue, wait for pending frames to complete, then look at what happened. If "3" and "4" were successfully transmitted, it would send a BAR with the sequence beginning at "5". If "3" was successfully transmitted but not "4", it would send a BAR with the sequence beginning at "4". But if "3" failed, and "4" didn't - it would set the BAR at "3" and then try retransmitting it. Finally (and this is another strange corner case I have to handle!) if "3" came back as having failed - and it failed too many times! - but "4" TX'ed ok, then I have to set the initial sequence number at "5" and send the BAR.

The other end (in this instance, the hostap) would then receive the BAR, set the new expected sequence number to be whatever was sent (say "5" in this instance), flush all pending packets in the reorder queue - even if there are missing packets (in the above example, "3" may be missing but "4" was received ok, so the receive stack would've been waiting for "3" to be received before sending it all up to the network layer!) and send back a block-ACK to the STA confirming the new window position.

Now (phew!) given all of that, you can see what kind of complicated stuff is needed to properly handle all corner cases when doing software (re)transmitting of packets. I haven't even begun to talk about how to handle sending and re-sending aggregate frames! All of the above needs to be implemented before I can do that.

So! The above is what I'm now working on. Once that's done, I'll work on handling what's known as "filtered frames" (and that'll be brain-dumped in a future blog post, but it has to do with handling power save stations correctly, or A-MPDU sessions will be torn down prematurely!) and then when THAT is all done and stable, I'll look at handling aggregates.

And when I handle aggregates correctly, we'll finally have fast 11n TX in FreeBSD. Then I can enable "ATH_ENABLE_11N" by default. :-)

Friday, June 10, 2011

Uninformed programmers, or "stop assuming virtual memory is awesome."

I decided I needed to vent a bit post-exam. So where better to find some clue-void post to answer than slashdot.

The post, and my reply:

In summary, the original poster:

"In short, don't worry about fine-tuning what's "in memory". Don't change behavior based on total amount of memory in the system. Operating systems (OpenBSD aside) ALREADY DO THAT. Just let the memory manager do its job, and give it enough information (via interactivity information, memory priority, etc.) to do its job properly. Don't try to hack around problems at the wrong layers."

And my response:

"You assume that the OS will make sensible paging decisions. You assume you can hint to the OS that you're going to make sensible paging decisions. You hope the application, which is likely big, multithreaded and such, is doing the sensible thing of not wrapping large accesses to "memory things" (eg big trees of data, as an example, or image caches, or whatever takes up more than a small bit of RAM) in mutexes. You assume that your application is using memory in a sensible fashion, and not simply using a few bytes here and there in each allocated chunk."

I hate to say it, but if you're assuming that virtual memory is the be all and end all of your memory management method, you're setting yourself up for some really bad worse case behaviour. Since you have no control as to where and when the OS decides to punt pages to disk, you can't possibly begin to design methods around it. You can only hope that the OS doesn't page out the data you've got locked, or that the malloc implementation you're using doesn't handle fragmentation poorly.

Saturday, May 28, 2011

AR9287 update

I finally gave in and whacked a FreeBSD-HEAD snapshot on my EEEPC so I can test the ath 802.11n code out with the various mini-PCIe NICs I have.

ath0: mem 0xfbef0000-0xfbefffff irq 18 at device 0.0 on pci1
ath0: [HT] enabling HT modes
ath0: [HT] 2 RX streams; 2 TX streams
ath0: AR9287 mac 384.2 RF5133 phy 15.15

.. and

wlan0: flags=8843 metric 0 mtu 1500
ether b4:82:fe:33:95:53
inet netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast
media: IEEE 802.11 Wireless Ethernet MCS mode 11ng
status: associated
ssid CACHEBOY_RS channel 1 (2412 MHz 11g ht/40+) bssid 00:1b:b1:58:f6:f0
regdomain ROW country AU indoor ecm authmode WPA2/802.11i privacy ON
deftxkey UNDEF AES-CCM 2:128-bit AES-CCM 3:128-bit txpower 30 bmiss 7
scanvalid 450 bgscan bgscanintvl 300 bgscanidle 250 roam:rssi 7
roam:rate 64 protmode CTS -ampdu ampdulimit 32k ampdudensity 8 -amsdu
shortgi wme burst roaming MANUAL

(Yes, there's no TX aggregation support for now so I've disabled ampdu.)


00:1b:b1:58:f6:f0 1 1 216M 24.5 0 30271 30064 EPS AQEHTRS RSN HTCAP WPA WME

It's happily sitting at MCS12 from my bedroom (which is what I expect given the noise on the 2.4ghz band where I live.)

Thursday, May 26, 2011

AR9287 support is now in -HEAD

I've just committed the last bits of the initial AR9287 support to -HEAD.

There's a few bits and pieces that need to be added but there's enough code there now to bring up a station interface and exchange traffic.

Friday, May 20, 2011

The count of Monte Cristo

I spent a couple of weeks reading through the Gutenberg ebook of "The Count of Monte Cristo". All in all I liked it. I could spend some time talking about what I liked, but there's plenty of that already on the internet.

I did however find the level and detail of the intrigues, manipulation, coercion and general dirty play a little on the creepy side. Don't get me wrong, it made a great book, but it felt almost like Dumas had read "The Prince" and decided to write a book putting it into play; a sort of "what if?" scenario where someone had been betrayed and wanted to get back at the world; then finding a suitable vessel to do this through.

Sunday, May 15, 2011

AR9160 11n performance - finally!

I've made some good progress with the AR9160 802.11n hostap mode in FreeBSD.

Firstly, the A-MPDU density setting needed tuning. "0" or "N/A" isn't appropriate for the AR9160 (and likely not appropriate for anything earlier than the AR9300/AR9400 series.) Once set to 8 microseconds, the number of A-MPDU retransmits dropped dramatically.

I found that there was some missing code to do with disabling RIFS (reduced inter-frame spacing) RX on the AR9160 which I committed to FreeBSD-HEAD. This has eliminated all of the baseband lockups I've been seeing, rare as they were now.

Then I found there were packets being dropped by if_arge on TX. It turns out the default TX/RX ring buffer size for if_arge was 128 packets - definitely not enough given the uncoupled interrupt/process driven forwarding engine in UNIX these days.

The background: since NIC drivers aren't doing their work in an interrupt or shared process context, they only do their work when their TX/RX tasks get scheduled. Since they don't have any way to signal each other to "back off" via flow control when the queues are getting filled, it's quite possible to have a very busy device (in this instance wlan0 RX'ing anything more than around 100mbit) queue enough packets to the devices' TX queue faster than the TX task can be scheduled to process packets.

Bumping if_arge's default TX/RX ring buffer size from 128 to 1024 did the trick - no more packet drops on TX.

Now I'm getting ~ 105mbit TCP RX in HT/40 5GHz hostap mode (since A-MPDU RX is implemented and working) and ~ 210mbit UDP RX before I begin to drop packets. Anything more than 210mbit starts resulting in the infamous "stuck beacon", but that could be for a variety of reasons. I don't think I'm saturating the PCI bus (read: the CPU scheduler does show about 30% idle clock cycles during a UDP RX test) so there's something else to be blamed.

Next is figuring out whether there's some scheduling issues with the device TX/RX tasks.

I find it quite creepy that I can get ~ 100mbit of 802.11n throughput to my macbook pro whilst lying in bed. But that's what 802.11n is for, right? :)

Monday, May 2, 2011

FreeBSD-HEAD on the PB92 + AR9280

Here's FreeBSD-HEAD up on the Atheros PB92 reference board (AR7242), complete with an AR9280 mini-PCIe NIC.

I'm still only getting around 70mbit in HT/40 mode TCP tests and 90mbit in HT/40 UDP mode; but it's only (currently) connected at 100mbit ethernet. I'll tinker some more with gigabit-connected stuff soon. I hope the UDP throughput maxes out above 100mbit.

It's a far cry from where it should be throughput-wise, but it's getting there.

Another developer has -HEAD + a small patch working on the Ubiquiti Rocket M5 (AR7240 + AR9280 on-board), which is also great progress.

# dmesg | grep ath

ath0: at device 0.0 on pci0
ath0: [HT] enabling HT modes
ath0: [HT] 2 RX streams; 2 TX streams
ath0: AR9280 mac 128.2 RF5133 phy 13.0
# uname -a
FreeBSD TEST_AP 9.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 9.0-CURRENT #19 r220911:221321M: Mon May 2 22:46:32 WST 2011 adria
n@pcbsd-3114:/data/freebsd/mips/head/obj/mipseb/mips.mipseb/data/freebsd/mips/head/src/sys/PB92 mips
# ifconfig wlan0 list sta
00:15:6d:84:05:52 1 157 240M 15.5 120 27094 58288 EP AQHTR HTCAP WPA WME
8c:7b:9d:d6:65:ba 2 157 270M 21.5 0 56040 64688 EP AQHTRS RSN HTCAP WME

Thursday, April 28, 2011

AR913x support in -HEAD, or TP-Link WR-1043nd

In summary:

KDB: debugger backends: ddb
KDB: current backend: ddb
Copyright (c) 1992-2011 The FreeBSD Project.
The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
FreeBSD is a registered trademark of The FreeBSD Foundation.
FreeBSD 9.0-CURRENT #6 r220911:221160M: Thu Apr 28 20:09:28 WST 2011
adrian@pcbsd-3114:/data/freebsd/mips/head/obj/mipseb/mips.mipseb/data/freebsd/mips/head/src/sys/TP-WN1043ND mips
real memory = 33554432 (32768K bytes)
avail memory = 21123072 (20MB)
clock0: on nexus0
Timecounter "MIPS32" frequency 200000000 Hz quality 800
Event timer "MIPS32" frequency 200000000 Hz quality 800
apb0 at irq 4 on nexus0
uart0: <16550 or compatible> on apb0
uart0: console (115200,n,8,1)
ehci0: at mem 0x1b000100-0x1bffffff irq 1 on nexus0
usbus0: set host controller mode
usbus0: EHCI version 1.0
usbus0: set host controller mode
usbus0: on ehci0
arge0: at mem 0x19000000-0x19000fff irq 2 on nexus0
arge0: Overriding MAC from EEPROM
arge0: Ethernet address: 94:0c:6d:fe:4f:20
arge1: at mem 0x1a000000-0x1a000fff irq 3 on nexus0
device_attach: arge1 attach returned 22
ath0: at mem 0x180c0000-0x180effff irq 0 on nexus0
ath0: eeprom @ 0x1fff1000
ath0: eeprom data @ 0xbfff1000
ath0: [HT] enabling HT modes
ath0: [HT] 2 RX streams; 2 TX streams
ath0: AR9130 mac 20.1 RF2133 phy 10.2
spi0: at mem 0x1f000000-0x1f00000f on nexus0
spibus0: on spi0
mx25l0: at cs 0 on spibus0
mx25l0: s25sl064a, sector 65536 bytes, 128 sectors
ar71xx_wdog0: on nexus0
ar71xx_wdog0: Previous reset was due to watchdog timeout
Timecounters tick every 1.000 msec
usbus0: 480Mbps High Speed USB v2.0
md0.uzip: 855 x 16384 blocks
ugen0.1: at usbus0
uhub0: on usbus0
Root mount waiting for: usbus0
uhub0: 1 port with 1 removable, self powered
Root mount waiting for: usbus0
ugen0.2: at usbus0
umass0: on usbus0
umass0: SCSI over Bulk-Only; quirks = 0x0000
Root mount waiting for: usbus0
umass0:0:0:-1: Attached to scbus0
Trying to mount root from ufs:/dev/md0 []...
da0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 scbus0 target 0 lun 0
da0: Removable Direct Access SCSI-0 device
da0: 40.000MB/s transfers
da0: 3835MB (7856127 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 489C)
Mounting from ufs:/dev/md0 failed with error 22.
Trying to mount root from ufs:/dev/md0.uzip []...
bridge0: Ethernet address: 06:26:1a:6f:d5:e7
wlan0: Ethernet address: 00:19:e0:66:66:68

And the wireless:

# ifconfig wlan0
wlan0: flags=8943 metric 0 mtu 1500
ether 00:19:e0:66:66:68
inet6 fe80::219:e0ff:fe66:6668%wlan0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x6
nd6 options=21
media: IEEE 802.11 Wireless Ethernet autoselect mode 11ng
status: running
ssid CACHEBOY_RS channel 6 (2437 MHz 11g ht/40+) bssid 00:19:e0:66:66:68
regdomain ROW country AU ecm authmode WPA1+WPA2/802.11i privacy MIXED
deftxkey 2 TKIP 2:128-bit txpower 30 scanvalid 60 protmode CTS
-ampdutx ampdurx ampdulimit 64k -amsdu shortgi wme burst dtimperiod 1

I'll see about sneaking this into -HEAD soon.

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Oh god, so much wireless hardware..

Since I've started doing wireless development, people seem to be sending me more and more hardware. (I've also bought some stuff off of ebay too, so I'm partially to blame for this. :-)

So there's this group of developers over in Europe/Russia who have been busy porting FreeBSD to a variety of wireless devices, but their work hasn't made it into the main FreeBSD tree (or been published at all in any public way.) I've been liaising with Aleksandr Rybalko to push their work into -HEAD in time for FreeBSD-9.0.

So far this has included:

  • Support for the Ralink RT305x MIPS SoC, with initial peripheral support;
  • nvram2env, a way of importing the environment from various bootloaders (eg uboot) into the kernel environment;
  • geom_map, a GEOM module which describes the flash layout for fixed flash partitioning schemes (again like uboot, but it can be used for anything.)
There's a few other things coming up soon, such as support for one of the Broadcom MIPS SoCs, further peripheral support for the RT305x (including the embedded wireless MAC/radio) and other bits and pieces which will prove to be useful.

It's been a pleasure working with them

Sunday, March 27, 2011

11n TX and RX experiments..

My experiments so far are as follows (all in 5GHz mode - 2GHz is just too busy in my apartment complex):
  • FreeBSD <-> FreeBSD 11n is stable on the AR9160 and AR9220. TX aggregation is disabled, so it reaches around 35-40mbit in HT/20 and 45mbit in HT/40 mode. I'm getting MCS13 between an AP and STA which are in different rooms in my apartment. MCS15 is achievable if the units are close to each other.
  • Short-GI in 40MHz works fine.
  • When RX aggregation is enabled, and IEEE80211_AMPDU_AGE is enabled with net.wlan.ampdu_age set to 5 (it defaults to 500), I get ~ 55mbit RX in HT/20 and ~ 75mbit RX in HT/40 mode. There's problems with out of order packets that are appearing -before- the calculated block-ack window and net80211 is dropping those. I'll investigate why at some point.
  • FreeBSD works fine as an 11n AP, obviously with A-MPDU TX disabled.
There's lots of stuff that needs to be tested at this point, including:
  • 2GHz operation, obviously!
  • 11n and legacy co-operation.
  • Other chipsets - AR5416, AR9280, AR9285.
  • Behaviour in the presence of noise, busy channel, etc.
  • Make sure that HT/40 mode is -correctly- protecting frames on both channels and is correctly waiting to make sure both channels are free before transmitting!
And stuff that needs to be implemented before we enable it by default:
  • A-MPDU TX aggregation, for STA, AP, Mesh and adhoc modes - this one is really needed and is going to take some time to do.
  • HT RTS frame protection - I have code for this which I'll commit soon.

Sunday, March 20, 2011

(More) wireless hackery

So instead of doing what I should be doing, I did some more wifi hackery.

The short summary version (all 802.11g 2.4ghz testing):
  • AR5416 TX is still unhappy and unpredictable. It's also like that with ath9k. AR5416 RX is perfectly fine.
  • AR9160 TX/RX is fine.
  • AR9220 (Ubiquiti SR71-12 and Ubiquiti-SR71-15) TX/RX is now fine.
  • AR9280 closed and open-loop TX is fine, RX is also fine.
  • AR9285 TX/RX is fine and stable now.
I'll now go and test out 5GHz AP/STA modes with the above (where appropriate) and see how they behave. I hope they'll be just as stable now.

Bernard has been making inroads into fleshing out the missing parts of the net80211 802.11n support. Many thanks to him for taking the time to dissect the 802.11n spec, the Linux 802.11 stack and spend time with some APs determining what they're doing.

Friday, March 11, 2011

More wireless hackery

I've had a busy week in the land of FreeBSD wireless driver hacking.

I've been porting over the AR9280 TX calibration changes from ath9k. The AR9280 NIC in my laptop loves it - but the AR9220 based SR71-12 is still unhappy. I'll go poke around and see if I can figure out what the problem is. I have some other AR9280 series NICs to try out.

I've been using hostap mode on the AR5416 and AR9160 and it still seems quite fine and stable.

I've ported over a number of changes to the AR9285 codebase from Linux ath9k. These include:
  • Fixing the TX power calibration curve code;
  • Handling a TX power offset at the beginning of the calibration curve;
  • Updating how the board is initially calibrated on reset;
  • Adding PA calibration.
I'm also trying to remove some of the duplicate code in the HAL that has crept up as chipset support was added.

I'm waiting to hear back from some other users about what effects it has on their setup. I still have to port over the (completely rewritten) radio board configuration code from ath9k that sets up all kinds of radio related gain, offset and various things. There's also software antenna diversity to port over. I hope that this all fixes the issues users have been reporting with AR9285 NICs just plain not working in a lot of instances - but working fine in others. I also hope it fixes the AR2427 support.

I'm still very unclear what may be up with the AR9280 support. The Ubiquiti high-powered cards tend to have strange EEPROM calibration settings, so it's quite possible FreeBSD just handles one of the options badly. That's going to take some time to figure out.

There's no point in getting 802.11n support enabled if I can't TX and RX cleanly, so I'm leaving 802.11n alone (for the most part) until the radios and MACs are behaving themselves.

Saturday, March 5, 2011

AR9280 TX errors - why it's important to care about how your hardware works..

One of the issues that I've been having with my AR9280 NIC is that MCS rates aren't being reliable.

Having fiddled with the TX power control with the AR9160 (and I'll write about that soon!) I remembered that badly-configured TX power control would result in the transmit side spitting out a (sometimes very) unclean spectral mask, with noise all over the place.

I did a little digging into how the AR9280 TX-side calibration works. It turns out that there's two methods of TX power control - closed-loop (with a power-detector ADC which compares the signal to a calibrated level) and open-loop (which I'm not yet sure about.) The AR9280 NIC that I have has the "open loop TX power control" bit set in the EEPROM, which indicates it needs open-loop TX power rather than closed-loop. A little digging shows that FreeBSD's HAL doesn't include closed-loop TX power control or any of the newer AR9280 calibration code (in particular the open-loop temperature compensation code.)

Long-story short, I've added the open-loop TX calibration and temperature compensation code from ath9k to the FreeBSD HAL (but I haven't yet committed it and won't until I figure out how to make it tidy) and suddenly all MCS rates TX perfectly fine.

So if you're using an AR9280 NIC, please keep a look out for when I commit this stuff and let me know if it improves things.

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

This is for Emily..

My friend Emily asks, "is there anywhere to buy a meat pie in New York?"

So I find this place on St Mark's place, east of First Ave.

And apparently it sells meat pies.

And lo and behold, they sell meat pies.

The answer is "yes".

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Week 1 - stuff seen randomly about

Here's a few random things I saw in the first week here, before I fell stupidly ill.

The Cupcake Lover:

A lot of Converse Shoes:

A nicely washed out photo of Times Square:

And "Radioactive", an Art display in one of the NY Public Library buildings in Mid-town. By the way, the interior of the library buildings I've seen thus far are gorgeous and make me wish I had even an inkling of photographic technique/equipment on me.

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Space Invaders!

Who remembers this?

Friday, February 4, 2011

Sleepless in New York..

I had every intent to actually run this as a travel diary for a few weeks, but a few things got in the way.

Well, no, I sort of fib - my normal "meh, diaries!" got in the way. So I decided to play a bit of catch-up - then I fell ill with a cold and respiratory infection which has kept me knocked out for a good week or so.

So, here I go - catchup.

The Flight Over

The flight over was mostly uneventful - except for the complete lack of sleep. Since this was a 30 hour transit from Perth to New York, this made for rather interesting experiences near the end of the trip.


.. was again, a complete and utter mess. I was sent to the wrong terminal; then after walking from terminal 2 to terminal 7 and back, I find I needed to walk across the road to the Bradley International terminal. I likely should have been much, much more prepared than I was.


Relatively smooth, for a change.

Subway to Manhattan

I sat next to a Brazilian photographer who told me of his love of asian women. He showed me a few photographs and then proceeded to photograph them secretly without their consent or awareness. I then figured out most of his photos are like that. This creeped me out somewhat.

Friday, January 28, 2011

AR9280/AR9285 support now working

I managed to find and fix the AR9280 and AR9285 support.

Things that needed repairing:

  • Updating the AR9280 initvals to the Linux ath9k ones resolved the radio initialisation issues, making everything magically stable!
  • The v4k EEPROM code (for the AR9285/AR2427) needed some surgery to reflect what was really going on. In particular, the 8 bit radio bias values in the AR9280 (v14) EEPROM are actually lots of 4 bit values; so the bias values being written to the radio were woefully incorrect. This restored AR9285 stability and made the AR2427 function.
  • The AR9280 RF registers need an extra delay before being written to. I guess since the earlier radios are externally connected via single-bit IO (and thus shift registers are involved), the later radios are too. Without this delay, the AR9220 panics on my MIPS board and I would get occasional unexplained resets when I configured an AR9280 on my eeepc. This fix has resolved both those issues.
I have one more fix to integrate for the AR9220 init path so the Ubiquiti SR71-12 and SR71-15 work; then the AR9220 is supported.

The AR2427 baseband seems to hang after a few hours of use, requiring a complete cold (power off) restart. There's some more initialisation code I need to port from ath9k and there's a lot of AR9280/AR9285 calibration code which I need to port over. I hope porting these two over will fix the stability issues that I was seeing. There's also some noise floor calibration fixes from ath9k which I need to integrate into the FreeBSD-HEAD tree.

So, there's been quite a bit of progress! I've had reports from users that the AR9280, AR9285 and AR9220 support is now very stable; much more stable than before.

Friday, January 21, 2011

AR9220 support; why AR9280 is broken

I acquired a pair of shiny AR9220 minipci NICs last week - Ubiquiti SR71-12 and SR71-15. They're supposed to be like AR9280 but on PCI, not PCIe. Unfortunately they didn't work under FreeBSD. After some sleuthing (read: guessing), I stumbled across an ath9k commit which reworked some workaround for some AR9220's, which include the Ubiquiti SR71 versions.

There's also a bus error when reading a random register which is only referenced in a debug statement. That's a whole other bug to try and deal with.

But now I've verified that with both the AR9280 and the AR9220, the FreeBSD code is definitely tickling the radio wrong. Only one of the two radio chains is even active for the most part, and that chain seems to go deaf quite often, resulting in a baseband hang and chip reset. It also explains why I was getting absolutely shocking 11n performance out of it in my 11n branch.

Thursday, January 20, 2011

LUSCA ipv6 - almost there (again!)

I've managed to now get the Lusca IPv6 code to perform IPv6 lookups, open a socket to the remote host and then try an IPv6 connection.

But this doesn't work - the legacy Squid-2 comm code does this:
  • Create an AF_INET socket via comm_open();
  • Pass that socket to commConnectStart() with the relevant hostname or IPv4 address to connect to.
If the host is an IPv6 host, the IPv4 socket won't connect to it.

So now I'll have to change the comm API slightly to make commConnectStart() return a FD on completion, rather than taking a socket to connect to. This will also fix a long-standing hatred of mine - where Squid/Lusca opens up a socket that just sits there until DNS lookups succeed. Ew.

Sunday, January 16, 2011

Lusca and IPv6 - almost there

Today's task - tying together the bits of Lusca's IPv6 work to be able to do an IPv6 AAAA lookup, join it with an IPv4 A lookup, then try to connect to IPv6/IPv4 hosts.

The result:

IP Cache Contents:

Hostname Flg lstref TTL N 4 21595 2( 1) [2001:4f8:fff6::22]-BAD

So far, so good. I don't have it yet connecting to IPv6 destinations, but all the right bits are in play to be able to do so.

There's plenty of bits in the Squid-3 DNS code that work around potential bugs/gotchas in DNS vs EDNS handling when handling some of the larger IPv6 record replies seen in the real world. I'm going to commit what I have thus far and then look at leveraging what they've done.

Sunday, January 9, 2011

What am I going to do now?

For those who have been following my life elsewhere on the internet, I have struggled for a number of years to finish an undergraduate degree. I've been studying on and off since 2002 and I'm finally two units away from finishing this Bachelor of Arts.

Which now raises a question - what am I going to do next?

I'd like to spend more time studying - but after spending 9 years on and off at this undergraduate degree, I can't help but wonder if I'm doing it because I'm scared of not studying. On the flip side, I think now that I finally understand how to "be" a student and achieve excellent results, I should capitalise on this whilst I'm in that mindset.

I'll see if I get into Linguistics Honours and try to get into something which I can use my psychology and computing skills with as well as straight linguistics.

I'm enjoying creative writing - but I definitely need a lot more practice with that.

I'm still enjoying working on CDN and HTTP/proxy stuff in general; I'm getting a lot of enjoyment hacking on the FreeBSD 802.11 stack and making Atheros devices work a little better; I really like working on embedded hardware. The question is whether I can find some more work in that area whilst I'm in Perth.

Time will tell. I have 6 more months to mull over that whilst focusing primarily on finishing my degree. I'm going to try and finish it on a high note - High Distinctions if possible.