Is 802.11n rate control being worked on?

Adrian Chadd adrian at freebsd.org
Wed Sep 15 03:16:46 UTC 2010


Hi John,

I'm working on bringing over the changes from Linux ath9k into our
HAL. I'm slowly starting on bringing over simple bits and pieces but I
hope to eventually be able to bring over large chunks of the hardware
fiddling almost untouched. Since the current open Atheros development
by people with the docs is occuring in linux ath9k, being able to sync
against that is high up on my todo list.

Rui told me his main problem was lacking in reliable driver code to
actually make/receive 11n frames reliably. I'm hoping to just lift the
ath9k hardware code but that doesn't help with the needed net80211
changes to support 11n.

If you're happy to take over rui's 11n work, I'm happy working on
porting over ath9k driver/rate changes.


Adrian

On 8 September 2010 20:32, Rui Paulo <rpaulo at freebsd.org> wrote:
> On 7 Sep 2010, at 19:41, John Nielsen wrote:
>
>> I am working on a network scenario which would benefit greatly from the MIMO features and higher bandwidth of 802.11n. It's my understanding that 11n is not fully supported in FreeBSD since there is no appropriate rate control algorithm in the tree. Is that still the case?
>
> I've worked on supporting 11n on ath_rate_sample but it's incomplete.
>
>>
>> I would _really_ like to run FreeBSD for this project, and I believe the Atheros wireless cards I plan to use are supported by ath(4). I'd like to find out what else needs to happen to complete the picture. I may even go so far as to write some code myself. :)
>>
>> Is anyone working on this at the moment?
>
> Not really, I did some work in the past, but it's incomplete.
>
>>
>> Is it just the rate control that needs to be done or are there other parts involved? Is MIMO separate?
>
> We have MIMO on some non-Atheros drivers, but one of these drivers (Ralink 11n) is not yet in the tree.
>
>>
>> Is there a detailed description of the missing pieces somewhere? Or a not-very-detailed summary of where to look and what to read to get started?
>
> Not really. There's some interest from other FreeBSD committers to get this going, so I'll let them chime in.
>
> Regards,
> --
> Rui Paulo
>
>
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