BUG? I can reproduce "Association request to the driver failed" at will

Johannes Berg johannes at sipsolutions.net
Fri Oct 16 06:07:12 EDT 2009


On Mon, 2009-10-12 at 10:15 +0300, Jouni Malinen wrote:

> Though, even in this case, there is actually a bug somewhere (in
> mac80211, I would assume).. The authentication attempt with the second
> AP times out because mac80211 ends up sending the direct probes to the
> MAC address of the old AP (which is now turned off). When wpa_supplicant
> tries to authenticate again, the direct probes are going to the correct
> destination and connection can be established.

I can't see that happen in mac80211 -- can somebody run this with some
printks in cfg80211 that tell us what exactly is being passed down to
mac80211's auth() call?

> I can reproduce this with the current wpa_supplicant (that has a
> workaround for this EALREADY for authentication case, but not for
> assoc) and the current wireless-testing. Roaming will get mac80211 into
> very odd state..
> 
> Not only is this association failing (after the authentication with the
> same AP actually worked), but the scanning state will also get quite
> confused.. The next scan trigger after this is never completed (iw scan
> gets stuck). Or well, actually, once I wait long enough for the AP to
> deauthenticate the client, it looks like mac80211 can recover. The scan
> command returned after five minutes of waiting.. ;-)

Good hint. It looks like it gets stuck between assoc and auth for the
old AP?

> > The "Association request to the driver failed" will
> > be shown even without "-d". Also note that the association
> > seems to actually work, e.g. I can ping throught the
> > connection.
> 
> mac80211 remains associated with the old AP (I think) and somehow
> remains in the state between authentication and association (with the
> new AP) which will block scans.

I think we need a cfg80211 event tracer :)

Actually, does wpa_supplicant _deauth_ from the AP, or does it just
disassoc? It's definitely supposed to deauth.

johannes
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