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From:
Stefan Sperling <stsp@stsp.name>
Subject:
Re: sys/qwx,sys/qwz: report RSSI as percentage
To:
Marcus Glocker <marcus@nazgul.ch>
Cc:
"Kirill A. Korinsky" <kirill@korins.ky>, tech@openbsd.org
Date:
Thu, 21 May 2026 22:31:03 +0200

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On Thu, May 21, 2026 at 10:19:49PM +0200, Marcus Glocker wrote:
> On Wed, May 20, 2026 at 01:02:13AM +0200, Kirill A. Korinsky wrote:
> 
> > tech@,
> > 
> > I think that Report RSSI as percentage, it is more user friendly than dBm.
> > 
> > So, here I've used the same conversion logic as iwx for both qwz and qwx.
> > 
> > Ok?
> 
> I prefer the % display as well, and the diff works fine with my qwz.
> So basically ok mglocker@, but maybe it would be good to have stsp@'s
> feedback as well before we go ahead committing it.

What is most important here is that the values reported to the stack
make sense relative to the background scan / roaming thresholds:

#define IEEE80211_RSSI_THRES_2GHZ		(-60)	/* in dBm */
#define IEEE80211_RSSI_THRES_5GHZ		(-70)	/* in dBm */
#define IEEE80211_RSSI_THRES_RATIO_2GHZ		60	/* in percent */
#define IEEE80211_RSSI_THRES_RATIO_5GHZ		50	/* in percent */

Do you have multiple APs that share an SSID to test roaming with?

> >  /* Antenna noise floor */
> >  #define ATH11K_DEFAULT_NOISE_FLOOR -95
> > +#define QWX_MIN_DBM	-100
> > +#define QWX_MAX_DBM	-33	/* realistic guess */

Is this really just a guess? Or did you get this number from somewhere?

I don't think this number is unreasonable (the theoretical max was -20dBm
if I recall correctly?) But we should be sure that the range makes sense
for this device, which may behave differently to the Intel ones since
RSSI is a vendor-specific heuristic. If we now end up always reporting
50% or less then we would constantly be trying to roam. And if we never
fall below 50% anymore then we will never try to roam. If we're somewhere
between those two extremes that's ok and we can keep tweaking it if needed.