More mysterious Tx excessive retries

[David Gibson]

On Tue, Apr 23, 2002 at 10:44:34PM -0700, Jim Carter wrote:
> The continuing saga of the Dell Truemobile 1150 (Agere firmware 6.16)
> vs. Linksys WPC11 (Intersil firmware 1.03).  This is with driver 0.10.
> 
> I've had another thought.  Suppose the reason the Linksys card under Linux
> cannot talk to the Cisco-Aironet access points is that it never acks
> (at MAC level) any packets.  Suppose the reason the Dell card thinks it
> has to retry so many times is that it never gets the acks.  Suppose the
> Agere firmware does the obvious thing, and acks as soon as it has the
> complete packet on the card with a correct checksum.  But the Linksys
> firmware doesn't ack until the driver confirms that it has the packet.
> The Windows driver would know how to do this, so the Linksys card works
> fine under Windows.  But the Linux driver doesn't...

Yes, this seems a very probably explanation.  What's weird, though, is
that the we didn't use to have this problem and I'm not sure what's
changed that might have made the firmware stop giving ACKs.

-- 
David Gibson			| For every complex problem there is a
david at gibson.dropbear.id.au	| solution which is simple, neat and
				| wrong.  -- H.L. Mencken
http://www.ozlabs.org/people/dgibson