Saturday, November 08, 2008

ath5k as an AP

I got ath5k AP mode working at least with 5212/5213 cards (known to be defunct with 5413 and 2425 at the time being).
  1. One needs these patches to the kernel:

  2. Grab some later version (a git snapshot at best) of hostapd and compile

  3. Run hostapd hostapd.conf

7 comments:

cyrill said...

Thanks Jiri!

Anonymous said...

Hello Jiri,
Can you please specify for which kernel is this patch suitable?

I tried 2.6.27.7 but now luck, thank you in advance!!!

Anonymous said...

I am thinking of using ath5k ap mode on Fedora 8, running kernel 2.6.26.8-57.fc8. I have Atheros AR5212/AR5213 PCI card. Currently I got madwifi 0.9.4 working with hostapd, but sometimes locks up the server with WPA2 PSK. Is ath5k driver any more stable (Stuck beacon, hard lock up issues)?

satish said...

for me the following is getting printed

"Configuration file: hostapd.conf
cfg80211: Calling CRDA for country: US
Mode: IEEE 802.11g Channel: 1 Frequency: 0 MHz
Could not set channel for kernel driver"

Regards,
Satish

Anonymous said...

any success doing this on AR5413 or AR5001X+ ??

Unknown said...

Satish: I had the same problem. If you don't let to set the channel by hostapd, the system seems to work, but does not send out the essid...

You might have to patch caps.c base.h base.c or/and reg.c check for "all_channels" module paramter patch, etc.
After some patch, I was able to set the channel by hostapd 0.6.9...

Andrej said...

This leads to the fastest kernel crash I have ever seen. Two minutes of hostapd and you're down. (Needless to say that stations can't associate during those two minutes anyway...) I don't know what exactly happens. That would require long hours of netconsole experiments. (I didn't get any reasonable panic message last time I tried that, just a completely frozen system.) Currently, both ath_pci and ath5k are useless in AP mode. They both crash the kernel sooner or later and recent versions of ath_pci have a performance limit of about 100 kbps for some reason or other. What a sad situation...

If I could get a piece of useful debugging information or just help by experimenting a little bit, please let me know.