[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#575229: network-manager: Wireless performance problems with ath5k driver

[chris+debian at chiappa.net]

Package: network-manager
Version: 0.8-1
Severity: normal
File: network-manager


This may more properly belong to the ath5k driver or kernel but since
it was my machine's recent migration to network-manager that caused me
to notice it, I'll report it here - please feel free to reassign.  The
ath5k driver apparently uses lots of cpu and causes long pauses in
connectivity when the wireless networks available are being
scanned...since network manager does this a lot, it leads to
persistent and annoying networking hangs, particularly noticable in
interactive sessions (ie, ssh).  It took me a while to figure out what
was going on - throughput with scp, ftp, etc seemed fine, but there
were frequent pauses otherwise even when signal strength seemed fine.
Finally I noticed in 'top' the phy0 process spiking CPU whenever this
happened.

I found this bug against Fedora
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=506659 which claims that
there is unspecified "work done in the upstream kernel that will
mitigate this issue."

This is probably the upstream bug -
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12635 I figured for
tracking purposes there should be something in Debian about this
problem.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: squeeze/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-3-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages network-manager depends on:
ii  adduser                       3.112      add and remove users and groups
ii  dbus                          1.2.20-2   simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  dhcp3-client                  3.1.3-2    DHCP client
ii  ifupdown                      0.6.10     high level tools to configure netw
ii  libc6                         2.10.2-6   Embedded GNU C Library: Shared lib
ii  libdbus-1-3                   1.2.20-2   simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libdbus-glib-1-2              0.84-1     simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libgcrypt11                   1.4.5-2    LGPL Crypto library - runtime libr
ii  libglib2.0-0                  2.22.4-1   The GLib library of C routines
ii  libgnutls26                   2.8.5-2    the GNU TLS library - runtime libr
ii  libgudev-1.0-0                151-2      GObject-based wrapper library for 
ii  libnl1                        1.1-5      library for dealing with netlink s
ii  libnm-glib2                   0.8-1      network management framework (GLib
ii  libnm-util1                   0.8-1      network management framework (shar
ii  libpolkit-gobject-1-0         0.96-1     PolicyKit Authorization API
ii  libuuid1                      2.16.2-0   Universally Unique ID library
ii  lsb-base                      3.2-23     Linux Standard Base 3.2 init scrip
ii  udev                          151-2      /dev/ and hotplug management daemo
ii  wpasupplicant                 0.6.10-2   client support for WPA and WPA2 (I

Versions of packages network-manager recommends:
ii  dnsmasq-base               2.52-1        A small caching DNS proxy and DHCP
ii  iptables                   1.4.6-2       administration tools for packet fi
ii  modemmanager               0.3-2         D-Bus service for managing modems
pn  network-manager-gnome | ne <none>        (no description available)
ii  policykit-1                0.96-1        framework for managing administrat
ii  ppp                        2.4.4rel-10.1 Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) - da

Versions of packages network-manager suggests:
ii  avahi-autoipd                 0.6.25-3   Avahi IPv4LL network address confi