status-report 11ac, Intel

[Bjoern A. Zeeb]

Hi,

some of you had seen the tweet from the Foundation a longer while ago 
(or the phoronix article [1]) that they are sponsoring 11ac work and 
“it’s me” who’s looking at it now part-time.

For this work the initial focus will be on getting 11ac (non-AP) support 
into our stack.
We’ll be using the Intel’s mvm driver (know as iwm in FreeBSD 
currently) as a reference for that work.

In addition we’ll also try to make sure to support newer chipsets as 
supported by iwlwifi.
As some of you might be aware that Idwer has work in progress to port 
over iwx from OpenBSD and from iwlwifi [2] and that is amazing and 
he’s done a lot of work, and I hope I can work with him in this 
process to sort out issues and build a common ground for 11ac.

I’ll send a status update as there are things to report;  probably 
more regularly as there is something working and to test.


Best Regards,
Bjoern

PS:  there is a way longer-term perspective I’d like to get feedback 
for, mostly independent of this, and I’ll send a separate email for 
this.

[1] 
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=802.11ac-FreeBSD-Sponsor
[2] https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=244261