Bug 237711 - iwm: No 802.11n or 802.11ac support
Summary: iwm: No 802.11n or 802.11ac support
Status: In Progress
Alias: None
Product: Base System
Classification: Unclassified
Component: kern (show other bugs)
Version: CURRENT
Hardware: amd64 Any
: --- Affects Many People
Assignee: Mark Johnston
URL:
Keywords: feature
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2019-05-02 18:16 UTC by Neel Chauhan
Modified: 2020-09-13 17:21 UTC (History)
10 users (show)

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Description Neel Chauhan 2019-05-02 18:16:34 UTC 
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)?
Comment 1 Mark Johnston freebsd_committer 2019-11-05 18:35:04 UTC 
I doubt ac support will come soon, but it doesn't look too hard to port the OpenBSD changes for initial 802.11n support.
Comment 2 Andriy Gapon freebsd_committer 2020-05-20 15:42:48 UTC 
(In reply to Mark Johnston from comment #1)
Mark, are you working on this?
Any patches / progress?
Thanks!
Comment 3 Mark Johnston freebsd_committer 2020-05-20 18:03:54 UTC 
(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.
Comment 4 Eirik Oeverby 2020-09-13 11:15:24 UTC 
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?