Wireless Networking
Introduction
Welcome to the FreeBSD 802.11 wireless protocol and driver overview.
If you need help setting up a wireless connection, check out the Wireless FAQ.
Contents
Other pages in this section
Recommend cards
FreeBSD supports a lot of WiFi cards with a variety of features, while support is improving all the time, it may be the case that the wifi card in your computer is not currently supported. In that event we suggest either using a USB Realtek WiFi device (such as those supported by rtwn) or if your computer is capable of having the internal WiFi card replaced an Intel Wireless devices such as those supported by iwlwifi.
Supported Features
This section outlines Wireless (IEEE 802.11) Standards and Protocol support in FreeBSD. Whether specific features are supported on particular hardware is chipset and driver specific.
Note: Feature support is dependent on chipset, and on each individual wireless driver implementation.
- 11a, 11b, 11g, 11n operating modes
- Half (10MHz) and Quarter (5MHz) Rate Support
See also: Atheros Half & Quarter Rate Support
Operating Modes: HostAP, Station, Ad-Hoc, Monitor
- Multi-SSID HostAP Mode
- Security
- WEP, WPA, AES-CCMP, TKIP
- Hardware Encryption Offload
Aggressive Mode: Best-effort traffic performance improvement in QoS BSSes
Wireless Distribution System (WDS) and Dynamic Wireless Distribution System (DWDS)
- A-MSDU Transmit Support
- Atheros 802.11a Turbo Mode
- Atheros 802.11g TurboG Mode
Additional Features:
Under Current Development
802.11s /Mesh - initial support, under development
- ath/ath_hal 802.11n TX aggregation/blockack support
- Radar detection / TPC support
- Ralink 802.11n chipset support
/LockIssues - stack and driver locking and locking issues
Chipset Support
Please see dev for further information. Please note, this isn't (yet) an exhaustive list.
Regulatory Domain Support
/RegulatoryDomainSupport - net80211 regulatory domain support
- Per-driver support (TODO)
- if_ath regulatory support (TODO)
TODO / Wishlist
These may have some funding available to implement. Please contact freebsd-wireless@freebsd.org if you think you're able to code up one of these!
Main ideas page: WiFi/IdeasPage. Unsorted ideas page: WiFi/TodoStuff. Unsorted problems discovered: WiFi/KnownIssues.
/80211ac - initial 802.11ac support
- Flesh out more 802.11n extensions to net80211
- Migrate the software A-MPDU management from various drivers (notably iwn(4), ath(4)) into net80211
- Migrate out the atheros sample rate module into net80211
- Teach if_ath and other drivers about the net80211 TX rate control code
- 802.11n DFS support
- 802.11h TPC support (driver support, related IEs)
- 802.11h channel survey support (RX signal strength histogram, related IEs)
- Channel steering support - ie, steering 2/5ghz capable clients to 5ghz SSIDs
- 802.11n IBSS support
- 802.11n mesh (11s) support
802.11 wireless access in vehicular environments support (802.11p)
/FixUpThings Fix up known things that we need for 802.11-2012 / 802.11ac-2013
Developer Corner
Here's a variety of random developer notes!
/BringUp - Bringing up an 802.11 driver (currently only covers bringing up 11n support)
/TxNotes - net80211 transmit and receive path related notes, mostly to look at concurrency issues
RTylerCroy/WifiNotes - Collection of notes from discussions with AdrianChadd on the FreeBSD wireless networking stack and how to work effectively with the stack
Further Information
Please contact freebsd-wireless@freebsd.org for any further information.