802.11n support

Juel

Hi,
I successfully installed the 2.0 Beta and was happy that instead of 1.2.3 my
Atheros 9280 WLAN card was recognized by FreeBSD 8.0

Unfortunately I now see in the Status–>Interfaces-->Status: no carrier...
Console says: ath_chan_set: unable to reset channel 11 (2462 Mhz, flags 0x480), hal status 3

I'm not quite sure if my card supports both, 5GHz and 2.4GHz... I definetly know that my antenna only supports
5GHz - so that might be a problem... anyway I would like to know if there are any plans to support 802.11n in the near future,
maybe alredy in the 2.0 final release ?

Thanks, Juel

jimp

Unfortunately it's not up to us, it's up to the base OS (FreeBSD 8 ) and not much we can do besides test and offer feedback to them.

There are a couple cards out there that support N but are not fully supported as N on FreeBSD. As far as I know the mwl(4) cards based on the Marvell 88W8363 chipset are the only ones with working 802.11N rate control. Support for these is in pfSense 2.0 snapshots now, but there is some ongoing work in the GUI to properly set all of the proper knobs to make it work. There are no working rate control mechanisms for Atheros 802.11n cards, last I heard.

Wireless channels fall into two categories, B/G (2.5GHz) and A (5GHz). Each channel is 20MHz wide with B/G and A. N uses double width high throughput ('HT') channels of 40MHz each. So if you want to use 5GHz channels, they are most likely listed as 'A' and not 'N'.

Efonnes

Throughput above A/G speeds does not seem to be possible at the moment when operating in N mode even on the cards supported by the mwl driver. In the newest snapshots (most likely today and later), N channels are listed as b/g/n or a/n. The wireless standard you use would be 802.11ng or 802.11na, depending on which of the channel types you want it to operate on.

Juel

Ok, thanks a lot for the quick replies - I get the same error in the 5Ghz band,
which is probably caused by FreeBSDs hal.

I will turn to FreeBSDs support to get it fixed, thx!

Efonnes

Does the snapshot you are using list b, g, ng, a, and na or does it only show g ht and a ht? If it is the latter, try updating to a newer snapshot that shows the ng and na modes in the list.