Infdrop event message

Jouni Malinen jkmaline at cc.hut.fi
Mon Jul 28 23:05:21 EDT 2003


On Mon, Jul 28, 2003 at 06:51:03PM +0100, caeiro wrote:

> I'm doing some tests using iperf and I detect that when I use small packet lenghts (about 160 bytes) for transmission rates about 400K I receive on dmesg some INFDROP event messages. Some one can help me to understand what does it mean.

INFDROP is informing the driver about dropped information frame. In this
case, I would assume this would be a dropped CommTallies (TX/RX
statistics) information. These errors are usually generated when the
host system is not processing incoming information frames quickly enough
and Prism2 card runs out of buffer space. However, I have also seen
cases in which the firmware seems to have confused something and is
generating one InfDrop per packet..

Which station firmware version are you using? InfDrop behavior seems to
vary a bit based on the used firmware version. Some issues could
possibly be solved by moving to use 32-bit tallies instead of the
default 16-bit ones, but this does not work on all old STA firmware
versions. I'm not that worried about couple of InfDrop events, but flood
of those (like one per TX packet) should be worked around somehow.
Inquiring the firmware for a CommTally seems to fix some cases and if I
remember correctly, I added some kind of workaround for some of the
issues (but not all).

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA



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