Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 248754
Wifi signal strength not available for rt2500
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:12:10 EST
Description of problem: The GNOME network applet doesn't show the signal strength on my Wlan0 device, and network works just fine. I have rt2500 based wireless card. The applet works just fine on my F7 with legacy rt2500 drivers, but it does not with Fedora's supplied (buggy) drivers. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): 2.18.0-7.fc7 and above. How reproducible: Every time. Actual results: The applet does not show signal strength. Expected results: To show signal strength.
Modified since it's an issue with the kernel module instead.
At this moment rt2x00 only reports the RSSI of received frames, "Noise" and "Signal" reporting are both disabled. Main reason for the disabling of those statistics is that I am not sure what values should actually be passed on. rt2x00 cannot measure "Noise", so all it could report is the currently configured AGC VGC value. As for the "Signal", there isn't a real value which can be reported. The legacy driver that did report the "Signal". But that caused dozens of bug reports by users because the "Signal" value didn't make a lot of sense. This was because the reported "Signal" was actually the "RSSI - AGC VGC", which isn't the most sensible value. I am considering reporting the AGC VGC value as "Noise" again, but I have no ideas on a possible value "Signal" value yet.
I have rechecked the RX descriptors, documentation and the legacy drivers. With the legacy drivers the Signal value was sometimes filled in with the Bitrate at which the frame was received. This is hardly a usable value. But other then that I can't find anything usefull that can be used for the signal value... I could possibly use the AGC VGC value, but I am a bit reluctant about that since I more see it as the noise value (Although off course this value is not measured). So if the Signal field should really be filled, I can either copy the rssi value or use the AGC VGC value... Neither sounds too appearling. :S John, Do you have any suggestions about this?
rt2x00 2.0.5 has just been released containing signal reporting.
Please try the kernels here: http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=12706 Do these resolve the issue?
It seems it does. I installed 2.6.22.1-45.fc7 on my Rawhide system and Gnome applet shows the signal strength. Cheers!