Hi,

I have read the following post http://code.google.com/p/x-wrt/issues/detail?id=139 which suggests there is wireless instability on the WRT54GL router with kam 8.09.

I am hoping this was just an isolated incident and is not typical. Is anyone able to comment?

Edit: After some more digging around I found a thread on this forum: http://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=19202 with a comment from Brain0: I thought so too, but it didn't run smoothly for long! The b43 driver based on 2.6.25 in 8.09 is quite old and has problems with stability. The 2.6.28 version works much better.

So am I best off staying on the 2.4 kernel? Does anyone know how I would go about obtaining the latest build, plus the 2.6.28 b43 driver and compiling?

Thanks,

jprknight.

(Last edited by jprknight on 30 Apr 2009, 16:59)

I had a lot of problems trying to use the open source b43 drivers from the 2.6 version of openwrt on my WRT54GS (v1.1). The access point would randomly disappear for minutes on end and some clients weren't able to reliably associate with the AP.

Specifically I have a windows xp machine with a Linksys WUSB54GR adapter. It could see the AP but frequently failed to associate with it. Other clienta could associate but would randomly loose their connection.

I saw this error repeated a lot in the logs: 

b43-phy0 ERROR: PHY transmission error

Switching from the 2.6 branch to 2.4 fixed the problems. I think the the open source broadcom wireless drivers in the 2.6 firmware simply aren't yet stable. One thing to note is that on the few occasions the WUSB54GR did connect to the router running the 2.6 kernel, it did so at a reported 36 or 54Mbps. After switching to the closed source broadcom drivers in kernel 2.4 the same adapter reports a link speed of 1Mbps, but the connection is stable. Maybe the 2.6 driver is too optimistic when assessing link quality leading to it trying to send data too fast?

Side note - unless there is a specific feature you need in x-wrt that is missing from the standard luci web interface I don't recommend x-wrt. In comparison luci feels much more polished and faster to respond. On a couple of occasions an x-wrt cgi script has hung using 100% of cpu (resulting in me needing to kill the process via shell prompt or reboot the router) not seen such problems since I switch to standard openwrt.

(Last edited by drbob on 2 Jun 2009, 00:15)

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