It is not trivial for a STA to implement the power-save mode. Maybe
NetBSD does something wrong in this regard?
 
Before a STA starts power-saving in infrastructure mode, its AP must ACK
a frame sent by the STA with the power-save flag set. Also, when an AP
indicates in its beacon that it has frames queued for a STA, a STA must
send a PowerSave-Poll to ask for a frame to be sent.

Maybe neither the Lucent/Prism firmware nor NetBSD's 802.11 state machine
handle these important STA functions? I have never considered before
that the firmware does not contain these functions, already.

(BTW, in HostAP mode, the OS is responsible for queueing answering
PS-Polls. It is on my list of things to do to add this function to
NetBSD, but if you try to use power-saving STA with a NetBSD Host AP,
now, you will be disappointed.)

Dave

On Sun, Nov 03, 2002 at 03:31:00PM -0500, Allen Briggs wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 03, 2002 at 01:57:42PM -0600, Peter Seebach wrote:
> > There don't seem to be any "pauses" - it's just that, suddenly,
> > during a connection, the connection will instantly close; it doesn't
> > time out, it closes within milliseconds of the last successful
> > packet.
> 
> I have just started trying to use wi(4) on an Apple laptop with an
> access point.  I don't have much to compare it to, but it seems work
> fine in OS/X.  It works better in NetBSD if I disable powersave mode.
> With powersave enabled, I can ping, but not ftp/ssh/etc.  Or rather,
> I can, but it seems that only the first bit of data gets transferred.
> Is powersave supposed to work differently?  There's next to no
> documentation on it in ifconfig(8).  I also notice that the AP is
> racking up errors, but that seems to be happening at some rate with
> OS/X, too--hard to tell if it's the same rate, though.
> 
> -allen
> 
> -- 
>  Allen Briggs                     briggs@wasabisystems.com
>  http://www.wasabisystems.com/    Quality NetBSD CDs, Sales, Support, Service
> NetBSD development for Alpha, ARM, M68K, MIPS, PowerPC, SuperH, XScale, etc...

-- 
David Young             OJC Technologies
dyoung@ojctech.com      Engineering from the Right Brain
                        Urbana, IL * (217) 278-3933