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ath9k
ath9k is a completely FOSS wireless driver for all Atheros IEEE 802.11n PCI/PCI-Express and AHB WLAN based chipsets.
Contents
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Mailing list
Our mailing list for this driver is:
https://lists.ath9k.org/mailman/listinfo/ath9k-devel
Get the latest ath9k driver
Any distribution shipping a kernel >= 2.6.27 will have ath9k present but the ath9k driver on 2.6.32 is the oldest one recommended, anything older than that is completely unsupported. Below is a list of the minimal distribution requirements to either use ath9k from 2.6.27 or from compat-wireless, which lets you install newer drivers on older kernels.
- Ubuntu Intrepid (8.10)
- Fedora Core 10
- openSUSE 11.1
- Mandriva Linux 2009.0 (formally known as Mandrake Linux)
- ARCH Linux
- Gentoo Linux
- Red Flag Linux 7.0 (based on Fedora 10)
If you want to get the latest ath9k driver you can get it by using the wireless-testing git tree. Read our git-guide for that. Alternatively you can download and compile ath9k and its dependencies alone by using compat-wireless. After downloading you can run:
./scripts/driver-select ath9k make sudo make install
Enabling ath9k
To enable ath9k, you must first enable mac80211:
Networking ---> Wireless ---> <M> Improved wireless configuration API <M> Generic IEEE 802.11 Networking Stack (mac80211)
You can then enable ath9k in the kernel configuration under
Device Drivers ---> [*] Network device support ---> Wireless LAN ---> <M> Atheros 802.11n wireless cards support
Bluetooth coexistence
ath9k supports 2-wire and 3-wire Bluetooth coexistence, for details see the ath9k btcoex page.
supported chipsets
- AR2427 (no 802.11n hardware support, its bonded out)
- AR5008
- AR5418+AR5133
- AR5416+AR5133
- AR5416+AR2133
- AR9160
- AR9220 (an AR9280 card over PCI)
- AR9280
- AR9281
AR9285 (>= 2.6.29)
AR9287 (>= 2.6.32)
AR9102 (AHB) (>= 2.6.30)
AR9103 (AHB) (>= 2.6.30)
Available devices
See the ath9k device list.
Working
All of these modes of operation are supported and should work on all ath9k cards.
Modes of operation
Station Mode
AP Mode
IBSS Mode
Monitor Mode
Mesh point
Features
- 802.11abg
- 802.11n
- HT20
- HT40
- AMPDU
- Short GI (40 MHz only)
- 802.11i
- WEP 64 / 127
- WPA1 / WPA2
- 802.11d
- 802.11h
- 802.11w/D7.0
- WPS client side (use wpa_gui-qt4 from wpa_supplicant for now)
- WMM
- LED
- RFKILL
- BT co-existence
- 64-bit support / big endian, small endian
- AHB and PCI bus
A little history on ath9k
When it went in
ath9k was announced to have been merged into Linux-2.6.27-rc3 by Linus on Tue, 12 Aug 2008 19:33:16 -0700 (PDT), and consisted of 58.8% of the entire rc3 patch.
Early distributions which picked it up
OpenWrt became the first distribution to pick up ath9k and contribute to it.
Other sections
For more information please see:
ath.ko module – used for shared code between Atheros devices