I'm sure that it's well known that FreeBSD iwm lacks 802.11n and 802.11ac support. I believe OpenBSD supports 802.11n on iwm (I couldn't try OpenBSD as it doesn't boot on my laptop). A commit is here: https://github.com/openbsd/src/commit/d1ea7b2160ed2eb0df49e1e2db31cabcceb666cb There is an abandoned GSoC project for FBSD 802.11n/ac: https://wiki.freebsd.org/SummerOfCode2017/Porting80211nAnd80211acToFreeBSDiwm Would someone be willing to write a FreeBSD patch for at least 802.11n on iwm (if not ac)?
I doubt ac support will come soon, but it doesn't look too hard to port the OpenBSD changes for initial 802.11n support.
(In reply to Mark Johnston from comment #1) Mark, are you working on this? Any patches / progress? Thanks!
(In reply to Andriy Gapon from comment #2) Unfortunately I never got very far with this. At one point I had iwm using 11n rates, but the throughput was absymal. I didn't have much access to the AP I was testing against, so I bought another wifi card to use for that, thinking it was supported by FreeBSD, but it was not, and at that point I moved on to other things. I would still like to get back to it this summer, but I don't have any patches to share yet.
I have a gen6 ThinkPad X1 Carbon with iwm, and the lack of n or ac support is becoming more and more noticeable. There are now more APs out there that don't offer a/b/g at all, or where the bandwidth available to those connecting using these old standards is artificially limited even further. What is needed to get this work started/prioritized again?
https://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2020-04-2020-06.html#Intel-wireless-and-11ac-update is under way - follow bz@ updates on https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-wireless/2020-April/009055.html
(In reply to Dave Cottlehuber from comment #5) More here these days: https://wiki.freebsd.org/WiFi/Iwlwifi There is going to be an update soon to that. I believe 11n will be on the menu to work through in net80211 and iwlwifi + linuxkpi once I'll be back in Sept.
<https://www.freebsd.org/releases/13.1R/relnotes/#drivers-device> describes the iwlwifi(4) driver and LinuxKPI 802.11 compatibility layer as: * supplemental to iwm(4). <https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=iwlwifi&sektion=4&manpath=FreeBSD#DESCRIPTION> for iwlwifi(4) describes support for 802.11 n/ac as: * to come. Can we reasonably assume that when support comes in iwlwifi, there will not _also_ be support in iwm? If so: maybe edit the summary line of this bug report, to refocus on iwlwifi. Thanks