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  • Manikanta Pubbisetty's avatar
    mac80211: add stop/start logic for software TXQs · 21a5d4c3
    Manikanta Pubbisetty authored
    
    
    Sometimes, it is required to stop the transmissions momentarily and
    resume it later; stopping the txqs becomes very critical in scenarios where
    the packet transmission has to be ceased completely. For example, during
    the hardware restart, during off channel operations,
    when initiating CSA(upon detecting a radar on the DFS channel), etc.
    
    The TX queue stop/start logic in mac80211 works well in stopping the TX
    when drivers make use of netdev queues, i.e, when Qdiscs in network layer
    take care of traffic scheduling. Since the devices implementing
    wake_tx_queue can run without Qdiscs, packets will be handed to mac80211
    directly without queueing them in the netdev queues.
    
    Also, mac80211 does not invoke any of the
    netif_stop_*/netif_wake_* APIs if wake_tx_queue is implemented.
    Since the queues are not stopped in this case, transmissions can continue
    and this will impact negatively on the operation of the wireless device.
    
    For example,
    During hardware restart, we stop the netdev queues so that packets are
    not sent to the driver. Since ath10k implements wake_tx_queue,
    TX queues will not be stopped and packets might reach the hardware while
    it is restarting; this can make hardware unresponsive and the only
    possible option for recovery is to reboot the entire system.
    
    There is another problem to this, it is observed that the packets
    were sent on the DFS channel for a prolonged duration after radar
    detection impacting the channel closing time.
    
    We can still invoke netif stop/wake APIs when wake_tx_queue is implemented
    but this could lead to packet drops in network layer; adding stop/start
    logic for software TXQs in mac80211 instead makes more sense; the change
    proposed adds the same in mac80211.
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarManikanta Pubbisetty <mpubbise@codeaurora.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJohannes Berg <johannes.berg@intel.com>
    21a5d4c3