Is 802.11n rate control being worked on?

[John Nielsen]

On Sep 14, 2010, at 11:16 PM, Adrian Chadd wrote:

> 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.

Sounds like a plan. The rate control is separate from the HAL, correct? Would you be working on that as well?

> 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.

These would be driver-independent net80211 changes?

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

I'm definitely happy to look at it. I'll wait until I know just how far over my head this project is and how much time I'll have for it before I commit to it though. :) What still needs to happen for 11n in net80211? Are any of MIMO, 40MHz channels, 5GHz operation, etc candidates for common code or is all of that handled in the driver?


> 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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