Re: WiFi on NetBSD

[mlelstv%serpens.de@localhost (Michael van Elst)]

asbatwrk%gmail.com@localhost (Andrew Ball) writes:

>    I find 802.11a suits my needs well but out of interest, am I right
>in thinking that NetBSD doesn't yet have support for 802.11n, .11ac or
>.11ax?  Is it just* a question of device drivers for the network
>adaptors or is there more involved?

There is no support for 'n', 'ac' or 'ax'.

This is, mostly, not just a matter of drivers, as part of the
functionality is in generic device-independent code. Updating
that part is work in progress and unfortunately also requires
to rework all existing wifi drivers, which is the main reason
why it wasn't done for a long time.

There is one exception, there are wifi interfaces that handle
even higher protocol details themselves in firmware. The
Wifi interfaces that come with some Raspberry Pi models are
of this sort.

E.g. this is a RPI4 connecting to a 802.11ac network:

bwfm0: flags=0x8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
        ssid XXXXXXXX nwkey *****
        powersave off
        bssid xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx chan 36
        address: xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
        media: IEEE802.11 autoselect (VHT mode 11ac)
        status: active

Doesn't mean the interface is really fast then. The hardware supports
only a single stream, and our SDIO driver adds overhead.

iperf3 reports about 40-50Mbit/s receiving and 20-30Mbit/s sending.
Linux on the same hardware gets 80-90Mbit/s receiving and 60-70Mbit/s
sending.

Still better than with 802.11g.