On 4/25/24 5:51 AM, Kalle Valo wrote:

I do not use Network Manager or other connection managers when testing.
It's much more reliable to use wpasupplicant directly and you get full
control. I usually create a custom config file and then start the
supplicant manually. Some pointers:

(...)

I had some time today to test this, but unfortunately I couldn't figure out if wpa_supplicant was using WPA2 or WPA3. Trying to connect via `key_mgmt=SAE` caused `dhcpcd` to time out looking for carriers, so I guess it was connecting via WPA2. In any case the speed results were the same as disabling WPA3 on the router-side.

The reason I'm sending this email despite not making much progress above is because it turns out I was chasing a red herring. The real problem behind the degraded throughput was 802.11w. The router was advertising support for it (802.11w capable but optional), but was not forcing clients that didn't have the capability (required mode).

In Optional mode, I was experiencing the degraded performance. But after I disabled 802.11w on the router side, the speeds recovered to normal levels on both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands, even connected over WPA3.

So I'm guessing something on the driver's side is signaling that it supports 802.11w, when in reality it doesn't or some bug with the implementation causes the speed to drop. Or maybe there's an overhead I'm unaware of when 802.11w is enabled? My limited understanding of 802.11w is that the management frames are protected to prevent deauth attacks.

I'm not sure where to begin troubleshooting this, but in the interim can I disable the capability advertising on the driver-level? I don't want to disable 802.11w on my entire network, if possible.

- Eric


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