Wifi speed and version using nl80211?

[peterdk]

Hi @nokyan ,

One of the things missing for the link stuff, is the wifi link speed and version, Like WIFI 6 - 500mbit/s.

I did look into that when doing the Link stuff, but there is no sysfs or proc entry for that. The proper way is to use nl80211 kernel interface (link). So I really think it would be nice to show this info, so I am wondering what the best approach would be? I see for example existing Rust crates like neli-wifi, which seem to be quite conservative in dependencies. But I am totally not sure what your policy on new dependencies is? Not sure if for example we would prefer a small own written library to use this interface purely for our needs? Or do you say, let's review the dependencies and move ahead with trying to get the info we want using another crate.

Greetings,

Peter

[nokyan]

Hi @peterdk,

I'm not opposed to new dependencies if there's a good reason and of course if they're not sketchy. :)
neli-wifi and neli look fine and, as you found out, are pretty lean on dependencies, so I don't see why we wouldn't use that. Only thing that irks me a bit is that neli has tokio as an optional dependency - it'd be great if we could keep that out since last time Resources used async stuff, tokio and GTK's own async runtime liked to clash. It should be fine as long as neli-wifi's async feature is disabled.
Though, I'm planning to release Resources 1.8 probably this weekend, so it might not make the cut. That's not an issue though, your existing link speed contributions are already really really neat. :)

[peterdk]

Ah ok, cool! Yeah I have no hurries,.I'll just start exploring then. Great to hear that 1.8 is almost there. Was wondering about it, but too afraid to ask ;). Looking forward to it.

[peterdk]

@nokyan So, I had some time. Got it working in a hacky state, will clean it up codewise. But I would like to have your opinion on what to show.

I find this data a bit too much:

What do you think?
My proposal is:

Link
Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax)

Linkspeed
480Mb/s

Only problem is, Wifi connections are not symmetric, so we would then lose the sending speed. Not sure here, maybe you can chime in?

[peterdk]

It could also maybe be interesting to show the frequency as a separate item. But then clamped to 2.4, 5 and 6.

Frequency
5Ghz

[peterdk]

I experimented a bit with a separate frequency one, but that didn't make much sense when I tried it.

I think the Link with frequency is a good option:

Only wondering about the speed and rx/tx

[nokyan]

Yeah, I like that most as well

[peterdk]

Or displaying both indeed, but with label

[nokyan]

That looks pretty good! The only small thing I'd change is change Rx and Tx to something else (maybe Receiving/Sending?) because Rx and Tx aren't used anywhere else in the UI and are probably not immediately obvious to people who aren't used to those terms. :)

[peterdk]

I unfortunately ran into stability issues with my qualcomm based wifi card on my laptop. Somehow the kernel driver is unstable, and would hang the system when changing wifi and querying this. On my desktop with Intel no issues, but don't think that it's a good idea to PR this when stability is a issue (albeit unknown what is causing it exactly). When I have some more time, I'll dive into this qualcomm driver and ask the devs about it.

[peterdk]

Pulled the new -next kernel today and it seems the issue is now solved! So will start working on a proper implementation and do a PR.

[nokyan]

Sounds nice! When you ran into the stability issues, were you also using a -next kernel or a standard kernel from the repo?

[peterdk]

I was using a next kernel as well. I found that other people using this specific laptop had also issues, and that it is purely the wifi driver, so not the nl80211 logic. Somehow it's a unstable driver in older kernels.

[peterdk]

I'll test it with official kernel to be sure it doesn't need a version guarding