Re: [PATCH ath-next 1/3] wifi: ath10k: set the PMF peer flag on WCN3990

[Conn O'Griofa <connogriofa@gmail.com>]

On 16/10/2026 01:17, Shunsuke Nagashima via B4 Relay wrote:

>   - The firmware sends its ADDBA Request frames unprotected. The AP does
>     not answer them, and no Block Ack agreement is set up, in both the
>     2.4 GHz and the 5 GHz band. On a 5 GHz WPA3 AP, iperf3 to a wired
>     host gave 22.6-31.6 Mbit/s up and 21.6-21.7 Mbit/s down, against
>     280.2-283.0 / 264.5-272.3 Mbit/s with WPA2 on the same AP. A
>     WPA2/WPA3 transition network gave the same low rate (23.4/22.7
>     Mbit/s), because wpa_supplicant chose SAE with PMF there.
>
>   - On 5 GHz, the protected Deauth sent at disconnect carried CCMP PN 0
>     (56 of 56 in one capture). One AP dropped it, kept the old
>     association and answered the next association with status 30, so a
>     reconnect took 24.3-24.4 s instead of about 5 s. Another AP accepted
>     the PN 0 Deauth. On 2.4 GHz the Deauth carried a live PN even
>     without the flag. I could not tell whether the band or the AP's
>     HT/VHT capability makes the difference.
>

I can confirm the same problem happens on a PCI bus hw1.1 revision 
QCA9377 in an Inspiron 5570 laptop (originally installed), primarily 
testing the 5GHz band due to 2.4Ghz being congested in my area:
ath10k_pci 0000:02:00.0: qca9377 hw1.1 target 0x05020001 chip_id 
0x003821ff sub 1028:1810
ath10k_pci 0000:02:00.0: firmware ver WLAN.TF.2.1-00021-QCARMSWP-1 api 6 
features wowlan,ignore-otp crc32 42e41877

Note that the MFP flag is not listed; I also checked the latest api 5 
firmware and the flag is also missing. Without any changes, the driver 
performs extremely poorly (~50Mbps) when PMF is negotiated with the 
default or latest api 5 firmware, and confirmed to be an issue on my ISP 
router and also a separate OpenWrt router using an ath11k chipset. Prior 
to discovering this patch set, my workaround was to allow WPA3 
Transition Mode on my routers and force PMF disabled on the client via 
NetworkManager in order to coax the connection into WPA2 mode with PMF 
disabled, allowing speed parity with Windows using WPA3 (~300Mbps).

By adapting your patch to also set ".peer_pmf_support = true" for my 
hardware, WPA3-SAE (i.e. with PMF enabled) now runs at full speed 
(~300Mbps).

Further context is available here (not my thread, but other users have 
reported the same issue with this hardware and I posted this patch with 
the flag added for my hardware): 
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=308424

Regards,
Conn O'Griofa