802.11ac support added to iwm(4) driver
802.11ac support for the iwm(4) driver
Stefan Sperling (stsp@) has added support for 802.11ac for the iwm(4) driver
This is great news! My laptop has an Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 8265 that uses the iwm(4) driver.
I updated my snapshot and checked the output (sensitive bits redacted):
# ifconfig iwm0
iwm0: flags=808843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST,AUTOCONF4> mtu 1500
lladdr 00:21:6b:xx:xx:xx
index 2 priority 4 llprio 3
groups: wlan egress
media: IEEE802.11 autoselect (VHT-MCS8 mode 11ac)
status: active
ieee80211: join xxxx chan 48 bssid f4:6b:ef:xx:xx:xx 61% wpakey wpaprotos wpa2 wpaakms psk wpaciphers ccmp wpagroupcipher ccmp`
Cool! There it is!
Autoselecting 2.4 GHz vs 5 GHz
I edited my /etc/hostname.iwm0
to stop it associating with the 5 GHz bssid and rebooted.
When it came back, the adapter was talking to my WiFi AP with 802.11n on 2.4 GHz!
OK I was only upstairs from the WiFi AP and I still get a strongish signal on 5 GHz (61% as you could see above)
So I looked at some of the follow up commits about how it scans and such and saw this subsequent commit:
Log message: Fix wrongly implemented check for 5GHz access point RSSI threshold.
This check was wrong for drivers which report RSSI as a percentage, such as iwm(4) and iwx(4). Such drivers will now prefer 5GHz with 50% or greater RSSI, as was intended.`
Hmm.. OK. Maybe it just wanted to talk on 2.4 GHz. I put back in the bssid with 5 GHz for now because there’s so much interference on my 2.4 GHz bands here, that I get lots of latency spikes (pinging the WiFi AP the TTL varies between 10 ms and 985 ms!)
I need to do some more playing around to see what threshold it switches over to 5 GHz and when it goes back to 2.4 GHz.
Thanks so much to Stefan Sperling (stsp@) for his hard work on the wireless driver stack in OpenBSD!