Linux Plumbers Conf 2014

One Line Summary

Abstract

Wifi drivers have bugs – and we mostly don’t know what they are. Problems are often resolved by rebooting, restarting a daemon, or unplugging/replugging the device, and driver developers might never learn this is needed. Or you might have strange incompatibilities between different types of devices that result in low throughput, high latency, poor roaming, poor rate selection, poor aggregation, too many retries, or wasted channel bandwidth.

One way to help diagnose problems is to assemble a collection of packet traces of known device interactions, and make it very easy for end users to produce such a trace and share it with developers.

Avery can demonstrate several prototype, open source tools being developed at Google Fiber to try to make large-scale diagnosis and analysis better, including http://gfblip.appspot.com and a new web-based tool for uploading, visualizing, and sharing streams of wifi packets in near-real time with the click of a button.

Tags

debugging, wireless, Analysis, wifi, visualization, diagnosis

Speaker

• 

  Avery Pennarun

  Google Fiber
  • Website: http://gfiber.googlesource.com/
  • Blog: http://apenwarr.ca/log
  • Twitter: apenwarr

  Biography

  Avery wrote his first three lines of code when he was five, but they remain unreleased due to patent problems. Since then, he’s co-founded four companies, sold one to IBM, created several popular open source projects (including wvdial, bup, sshuttle, redo, git-subtree, and netselect), and enjoyed a brief foray into marketing where he advertised software using fluffy bunny imagery. He now lives in New York working on Google Fiber’s next generation of wifi devices.

  Sessions

  • * Extremely high speed and high coverage home wifi
    • Title: Extremely high speed and high coverage home wifi
    • Microconference: Wireless Networking
    • One Line Summary:

      802.11ac speeds are great – if you’re 3 feet away.

    • Speakers: Avery Pennarun
  • * Cloud-based wireless packet capture, sharing, analysis, and diagnosis
    • Title: Cloud-based wireless packet capture, sharing, analysis, and diagnosis
    • Microconference: Wireless Networking
    • One Line Summary:

      It would be a lot easier to debug this wifi problem if only you had a packet trace.

    • Speakers: Avery Pennarun