Comment 18 for bug 373680

On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 2:42 AM, HaZeX <email address hidden> wrote:
> Luis R, i dont agree with your words:
>  "this bug report should be closed as its for an older kernel and in
>   older kernels this is just the way this works. If you want to take
>   advantage of bg scanning enhancements it is outside the scope of the
>   older kernels"
>
> Im using the latest official ubuntu release and is still affeceted by
> this bug.
>
> The only 3 workarrounds i have found:
>
> Use Wagner Volanin  patch for Network-manager
> or
> Remove network-manager and connect manually to the networks.
> or
> Using an alternative software like WICD to manage the networks.
>
> I hope it can be solve in the next release of Ubuntu, tell me if i can
> help testing something to solve the bug.

You missed my point, the point was that background scans do go off
channel for however long it takes a card to scan all the channels it
supports. This doesn't affect only ath9k, it affects all cards and the
proper solution would be to do a scan on each channel and then go back
to the home channel for a while. Do this until you've completed the
entire scan. This is addressed in a later kernel and therefore since
the change is considerably large such a change cannot go into the
stable kernel that Ubuntu ships.

I encourage you to try to become familiar with the upstream kernel bug
propagation life cycle so you can better understand how real critical
fixes get merged into the Linux kernel stable releases and how
implementation changes (like this one) won't go into stable release
but instead into a next kernel release.

http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Documentation/Fix_Propagation

There are indeed some mixing fixes for ath9k on 2.6.31 though, see:

http://bombadil.infradead.org/~mcgrof/patches/ath9k/fixes-not-in-2.6.31-for-ath9k.txt

these unfortunately did not get propagated into the 2.6.31.y stable
releases yet, but must be handled on a case by case basis. But since
each release for Ubuntu is made every 6 months and since 9.10 release
is not a long term support release you are likely better off just
installing something like linux-backport-modules to get the 2.6.32
wireless subsystem to cure your fixes for now.

I am not sure but lets say all ath9k 2.6.31 fixes eventually get
merged into the next 2.6.31.y, it may or may not mean Ubuntu 9.10's
2.6.31 latest kernel will get those updates, depends likely on the
severity and the kernel package policy for Ubuntu.

Hope this better helps understand what I meant.

  Luis