NOTE: this page is for archival only, see the note at the end of the page.

Using ath9k on RHEL5

John Linville recently announced RHEL 5.5 will get a wireless facelift. The facelift consists of getting a new mac80211, cfg80211 and some wireless drivers backported from 2.6.32 down to 2.6.18. Along with it came ath9k. This section documents how to get the kernels to get ath9k on your Centos5/RHEL5 kernels and tries to track any issues present on them.

Kernel

Go grab the kernels here:

http://people.redhat.com/linville/kernels/rhel5/

If you do not have RHEL 5.4 you can try Centos 5.4.

Usage notes

RHEL 5.4 and 5.5 only support wireless extensions as such only the old functionality that you are used to with 802.11 will be available. This is enough to get you using IBSS, and Station mode of operation. AP mode of operation is not supported, neither is Mesh.

Tested cards

  • AR5415
  • AR9280
  • AR9285
  • AR9287

Known issues

  • bug 543719 - ath9k associates but requires tcpdump to get DHCP replies

Enabling Network Manager

Network Manager is already stared but the applet does not come up. To do that, as root do:

service NetworkManager start

To make it automatically enabled do:

chkconfig NetworkManager on

This is a static dump of the old wiki, taken after locking it in January 2015. The new wiki is at https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/.
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