Making WiFi fast

Posted Nov 8, 2016 22:38 UTC (Tue) by Sesse (subscriber, #53779)
Parent article: Making WiFi fast

All of this would be a lot nicer if just all drivers supported mac80211… In particular, the Intel drivers (iwlwifi) don't, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of movement towards it. Sure, many Linux-based APs run ath9k and/or ath10k, but we need this both ways.

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Making WiFi fast

Posted Nov 8, 2016 23:45 UTC (Tue) by ay (guest, #79347) [Link] (4 responses)

iwlwifi is and has always been a mac80211 driver...

Making WiFi fast

Posted Nov 8, 2016 23:50 UTC (Tue) by Sesse (subscriber, #53779) [Link] (3 responses)

Well, for one, I can't use minstrel on it?

Making WiFi fast

Posted Nov 10, 2016 3:01 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

maybe its a hardware or firmware limitation.

Making WiFi fast

Posted Nov 11, 2016 0:01 UTC (Fri) by tohojo (subscriber, #86756) [Link] (1 responses)

A driver can opt in to using minstrel, or it can do it's own rate control. Iwl does the latter (not sure if it's in the driver or in firmware). Not sure what it would take to get the Intel drivers to use these changes, but I don't think it's trivial, unfortunately (my laptop also has an Intel card in it).

Making WiFi fast

Posted Nov 16, 2016 20:06 UTC (Wed) by mtaht (guest, #11087) [Link]

Let me point out a link to a talk that describes the enormous technical debt that needs to be paid down in just one (other) wifi driver set in order to make forward progress:

https://www.linuxplumbersconf.org/2016/ocw//system/presen...

These sorts of issues are almost universal in wifi, in every chipset and OS.