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

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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.

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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)
  • RHEL5 2.6.18 kernel being tested

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:


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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