2009/8/11 <damien.bergam...@free.fr>: > | [...] > | AFAIK, hostap mode is crappy with most drivers, since they doesn't vary > | the sending strength (AKA 'power saving') and the clients expect this. > | [...] > > Actually, power saving at the AP has nothing to do with "sending strength". > It is about buffering frames in the AP for clients that are sleeping. > And yes, OpenBSD does not currently do that, so clients that are sleeping > will never wake up (actually they will wake up at regular interval but will > immediately return to sleep) because the AP does not inform them that they > have buffered frames. This is something that is being worked on but that is > not easy to implement properly. > USB devices are usually a bad choice for building an AP anyway, since > they have some restrictions (usually, they do not give per-frame > feedback about TX retries, making it difficult to do per-client rate > control, or they don't provide a way to update beacons content > atomically, making it difficult to support anything but 802.11b or > plain 802.11a for instance). > Some drivers (ural(4), rum(4), maybe others as well) provide some very > limited AP support that can be handy sometimes but you can't rely on > this for everyday use. > The situation is a little bit better for PCI/CardBus devices, but we > don't support AP mode power-saving for them either.
Thanks you very much for explaining this. It's very valuable information and it might save me some time and money. I have PCENGINES ALIX hardware. I have a choice between MiniPCI and USB only. I guess it's best to get some ral(4) device on MiniPCI then. It's only for home use, but I want it to be stable. Can you recommend anything ? -- Regards Piotrek Kapczuk
