Speed degredation of Ralink RT2860 based wireless card in Natty

[Akavashi]

Hi Guys and Girls,

Just wondering if anyone else has noticed a significant drop in speed from their RT2860 based wireless cards?

I'm not sure if this is just an isolated problem on my end, so here's a bit more information.

I have installed the Natty daily build snapshot from the 2nd of April with Kernel version 2.6.38-7-generic, and compared speeds (using speedtest.net) to my existing install of Maverick with Kernel version 2.6.35-22-generic; and I must admit, the results are surprising!

Maverick Results:


Natty Results:


Both results were taken within 4 minutes of each other and can be completely replicated over and over.

Using lspci for both Maverick and Natty, return the Ralink RT2860 chipset:

lspci | grep "Ra"

Also, the network managers report that the kernel is booting the "rt2860" driver for Maverick and the "rt2800pci" driver for Natty.
It should also be noted that to make the RT2860 driver work properly in Maverick, I've had to blacklist the following drivers (as outlined here).

blacklist rt2800pci
blacklist rt2800usb
blacklist rt2x00lib
blacklist rt2x00pci
blacklist rt2x00usb

And a quick "sudo lshw -C network" for more info...
Maverick:

*-network
description: Wireless interface
product: RT2860
vendor: RaLink
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:03:00.0
logical name: wlan0
version: 00
serial: 70:71:bc:f0:30:e1
width: 32 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list ethernet physical wireless
configuration: broadcast=yes driver=rt2860 ip=192.168.1.103 latency=0 multicast=yes wireless=Ralink STA
resources: irq:19 memory:f2000000-f200ffff

Natty:

*-network
description: Wireless interface
product: RT2860
vendor: Ralink corp.
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:03:00.0
logical name: wlan0
version: 00
serial: 70:71:bc:f0:30:e1
width: 32 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list ethernet physical wireless
configuration: broadcast=yes driver=rt2800pci driverversion=2.6.38-7-generic firmware=0.11 ip=192.168.1.103 latency=0 link=yes multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11bgn
resources: irq:19 memory:f2000000-f200ffff

For the moment, I'd like to see whether anyone else can shed light or sympathise in the situation before I consider submitting a regression bug (which I've never done before ).

[Akavashi]

Upon further investigation... Blacklisting the aforementioned results in using the rt2860 driver, which still works within Natty and results in a significant improvement in speed.

I guess they're still in development with the new drivers.