Re: [PATCH v4 1/2] mac80211: Add support to trigger sta disconnect on hardware restart

From: Jeff Johnson
Date: Thu Mar 03 2022 - 11:44:58 EST


On 3/3/2022 3:55 AM, Youghandhar Chintala wrote:
Currently in case of target hardware restart, we just reconfig and
re-enable the security keys and enable the network queues to start
data traffic back from where it was interrupted.

Many ath10k wifi chipsets have sequence numbers for the data
packets assigned by firmware and the mac sequence number will
restart from zero after target hardware restart leading to mismatch
in the sequence number expected by the remote peer vs the sequence
number of the frame sent by the target firmware.

This mismatch in sequence number will cause out-of-order packets
on the remote peer and all the frames sent by the device are dropped
until we reach the sequence number which was sent before we restarted
the target hardware

In order to fix this, we trigger a sta disconnect, in case of target
hw restart. After this there will be a fresh connection and thereby
avoiding the dropping of frames by remote peer.

The right fix would be to pull the entire data path into the host
which is not feasible or would need lots of complex changes and
will still be inefficient.

Tested on ath10k using WCN3990, QCA6174

Signed-off-by: Youghandhar Chintala <youghand@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
---
include/net/mac80211.h | 11 +++++++++++
net/mac80211/ieee80211_i.h | 3 +++
net/mac80211/mlme.c | 12 ++++++++++++
net/mac80211/util.c | 33 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++---
4 files changed, 56 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)

diff --git a/include/net/mac80211.h b/include/net/mac80211.h
index bd6912d0292b..0773c50fa182 100644
--- a/include/net/mac80211.h
+++ b/include/net/mac80211.h
@@ -6064,6 +6064,17 @@ void ieee80211_disconnect(struct ieee80211_vif *vif, bool reconnect);
*/
void ieee80211_resume_disconnect(struct ieee80211_vif *vif);
+/**
+ * ieee80211_hw_restart_disconnect - disconnect from AP after
+ * hardware restart

nits:
remove excess space in "hardware restart"

"Do not leave a blank line between the function description and the arguments" per <https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/doc-guide/kernel-doc.html#function-documentation>

(I see that there is quite a mixture of compliant and non-compliant kernel-doc in this file)