Gmane
Favicon
From: emilio ancillotti <emilio.ancillotti <at> iit.cnr.it>
Subject: Re: multiple wireless cards
Newsgroups: gmane.linux.drivers.madwifi.devel
Date: 2008-07-26 11:36:16 GMT (23 weeks, 6 days, 15 hours and 53 minutes ago)
This is my network topology:
	
			A<--B-->C 

To exclude Interference between antennas I replicated the same experiments with two soekris instead of one.
Specifically, I use the same antenna placement but I sobstituted the second wireless card of B with 
another dedicated soekris

			A<--B
			    D-->C

In this scenario I achieved a per flow throughput of about 24-25 Mbps. So there isn't interference between antennas.

To excluded interference between wireless cards I repeated the same experiment of the first scenario
using a PC equipped with 
an Athlon 64 processor (2043.086 MHz processor with 1GB of memory). I put both the wireless cards into two
contiguous PCI slots 
using two miniPCI to PCI single Slot Adapter so that the wireless cards are about 1-2 cm from each other. Also
in this case 
both the wireless cards are able to work simultaneously and I obtained a per flow throughput of about 24-25Mbps.

I also opened the case of the soekris B and D of the second scenario and I bring the wireless card of soekris B
near to the wireless card of soekris D 
(varying their relative position ). Also in this case I obtained a per flow throughput of about 24-25Mbps.

This is a snapshot of the CPU utilization obtained with the top command when both wireless cards work simultaneously:

Cpu(s):  4.2%us, 27.8%sy,  0.0%ni,  0.0%id,  0.0%wa, 15.2%hi, 52.8%si, 0.0%st

As you can observe, the amount of time the CPU has been servicing software interrupts is about 52.8%,
and the total CPU  utilization is about 100%.

When I only use one wireless cards, the output of the top command is very similar to that obtained with two
wireless card
Specifically, the %si field is about 50%, and the total CPU usage is about 100%.

It's very strange that also with one wireless card and one asimptotic UDP flow the %si filed is about 50%.

Consequently, I think that the problem is related to the madwifi driver or to the soekris board.

Any suggestion?

Emilio

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge
Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes
Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world
http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/