The sad state of Linux Wi-Fi

#1

Post by tshepang » Wed, Jul 23, 2014, 6:04 PM UTC

The sad state of Linux Wi-Fi
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Re: The sad state of Linux Wi-Fi

#2

Post by captainmuon » Wed, Jul 23, 2014, 6:25 PM UTC

One problem is that WiFi is completely opaque, especially but not only on Linux. You get no low-level and no debugging information. It just connects and you get some bars, or it doesn't. I never know where to start when debugging a bad connection, and I wouldn't know where to start if I wanted to improve Linux WiFi.

For example, sometimes I can see a network, but can't connect. Why? I'd like to see something like "sent 100 low level packets, checksum failed on 88 of them, disconnecting".

Or I'd like some way to see whether receiving or sending is the problem - do I get garbled packets, or do I get good ones, but no answers to the ones I send.

Sometimes I know a connection is WPA2, but it stubbornly tries another encryption method. Why? Does the AP suggest it, or is it my configuration? Sometimes I can't enter a text password, it only accepts a fixed-length hexadecimal string (happens on Windows a lot). Again why? There is no good central low-level log file or debug tool that lets me see what is going on.

Re: The sad state of Linux Wi-Fi

#3

Post by danielweber » Wed, Jul 23, 2014, 6:26 PM UTC

Literally in the /etc/rc.local of the machine I'm on now:

    echo "STOPPING NETWORK MANAGER. . ."
    /usr/sbin/service networking stop
    echo "STOPPED"

wpa_supplicant is no picnic, but at least I have more of an idea of WTF is going on.

Re: The sad state of Linux Wi-Fi

#4

Post by cad71 » Wed, Jul 23, 2014, 6:28 PM UTC

Yep and that is the beauty, but also the pitfall of open source. People can patch to make things work for them, but also as long no one take up the task (or form a group) to fundamentally redo a driver or rewrite the architecture nothing happens. So you should take up the task to change things (find people to help you), that's the strength of open source (community driven)

Re: The sad state of Linux Wi-Fi

#5

Post by evmar » Wed, Jul 23, 2014, 6:29 PM UTC

The author wrote: "a billion mobile devices running Linux and using Wi-Fi all the time". I would bet that Android has a separate implementation of some of the wifi stack to make it work better.

Re: The sad state of Linux Wi-Fi

#6

Post by zercool » Wed, Jul 23, 2014, 6:30 PM UTC

captainmuon wrote: post #2

One problem is that WiFi is completely opaque, especially but not only on Linux. You get no low-level and no debugging information. It just connects and you get some bars, or it doesn't. I never know where to start when debugging a bad connection, and I wouldn't know where to start if I wanted to improve Linux WiFi. For example, sometimes I can see a network, but can't connect. Why? I'd like to see something like "se…

You're right. This is incredibly frusturating. Are there any good work arounds?

Re: The sad state of Linux Wi-Fi

#7

Post by mikepurvis » Wed, Jul 23, 2014, 6:31 PM UTC

It only gets worse on headless/embedded/arm machines. The RPi list of Wi-Fi adapters gives something of a picture:

http://elinux.org/RPi_USB_Wi-Fi_Adapters

Note the number of ones which require some additional configuration steps, downloads, patches, or other monkeying around.

And don't even get me started on connman and wicd.

Re: The sad state of Linux Wi-Fi

#8

Post by fragmede » Wed, Jul 23, 2014, 6:33 PM UTC

danielweber wrote: post #3

Literally in the /etc/rc.local of the machine I'm on now: echo "STOPPING NETWORK MANAGER. . ." /usr/sbin/service networking stop echo "STOPPED" wpa_supplicant is no picnic, but at least I have more of an idea of WTF is going on.

What distro are you on?

On the ones I'm familiar with, the network manager service is called 'NetworkManager' (inc caps) so I need to do 'service NetworkManager stop'

Re: The sad state of Linux Wi-Fi

#9

Post by pjmlp » Wed, Jul 23, 2014, 6:33 PM UTC

cad71 wrote: post #4

Yep and that is the beauty, but also the pitfall of open source. People can patch to make things work for them, but also as long no one take up the task (or form a group) to fundamentally redo a driver or rewrite the architecture nothing happens. So you should take up the task to change things (find people to help you), that's the strength of open source (community driven)

The strength that left me two months without WiFi on my Ubuntu install, as Canonical devs pushed their half backed replacement for the Broadcom drivers.

Reversing their decision meant for many, either spending a few sleepless nights struggling to undo their changes or wait for feature parity.

I waited, for me the time to spend nights tweaking Linux distributions is somehow gone at the turn of the century. Nowadays, either it works out of the box, or I don't care.

Re: The sad state of Linux Wi-Fi

#10

Post by nine_k » Wed, Jul 23, 2014, 6:34 PM UTC

evmar wrote: post #5

The author wrote: "a billion mobile devices running Linux and using Wi-Fi all the time". I would bet that Android has a separate implementation of some of the wifi stack to make it work better.

Android is open-source. I suppose that these workarounds would make it into the mainline kernel if they existed.