About ath9k#
ath9k is a completely FOSS wireless driver for all Atheros IEEE 802.11n PCI/PCI-Express and AHB WLAN based chipsets.
Subscribe to this page!#
You should subscribe to this page so you can get e-mail updates on changes and news for ath9k automatically. You’ll get an e-mail as soon as this page gets updated.
Mailing list#
linux-wireless is the recommended mailing list to use.
The archives for the old ath9k-devel list, which was closed in 2017, are available:
Get the latest ath9k driver#
ath9k is part of the kernel, but the latest version can be obtained from backports.
Enabling ath9k#
To enable ath9k, you must first enable mac80211 through make menuconfig when compiling your kernel. If you do not know what this means then please learn to compile kernels or rely on your Linux distribution’s kernel. Below are the options you need to enable ath9k through make menuconfig.
Networking --->
Wireless --->
<M> Improved wireless configuration API
<M> Generic IEEE 802.11 Networking Stack (mac80211)
You can then enable ath9k in the kernel configuration under
Device Drivers --->
[*] Network device support --->
Wireless LAN --->
Atheros Wireless Cards ---->
<M> Atheros 802.11n wireless cards support
Supported chipsets#
AR2427 1x1 SB (no 11n)
AR5008:
AR5418+AR5133
AR5416+AR5133
AR5416+AR2133
AR9001:
AR9160 2x2 DB
AR9102 2x2 SB
AR9103 3x3 SB
AR9002:
AR9220 2x2 DB
AR9223 2x2 SB
AR9227 2x2 SB
AR9280 2x2 DB
AR9281 2x2 SB
AR9285 1x1 SB
AR9287 2x2 SB
AR9003:
AR9380 3x3 DB
AR9382 2x2 DB
AR9331 1x1 SB
AR9340 2x2 DB
AR9004:
AR9485 1x2 SB
AR9462 2x2 DB
AR9565 1x1 SB
AR9580 3x3 DB
AR9590 3x3 DB
AR9592 2x2 DB
AR9550 3x3 DB
Available devices#
See the ath9k device list.
Features and modes of operation#
All of these modes of operation are supported and should work on all ath9k cards.
Modes of operation#
Station
AP
IBSS
Monitor
Mesh point
WDS
P2P GO/CLIENT
Features#
802.11abg
802.11n
HT20
HT40
AMPDU
Short GI (Both 20 and 40 MHz)
LDPC
TX/RX STBC
802.11i
WEP 64 / 127
WPA1 / WPA2
802.11d
802.11h
802.11w/D7.0
WPS
WMM
LED
RFKILL
BT co-existence
AHB and PCI bus
TDLS
WoW
Antenna Diversity
A little history on ath9k#
When it went in#
ath9k was announced to have been merged into Linux-2.6.27-rc3 by Linus on Tue, 12 Aug 2008 19:33:16 -0700 (PDT), and consisted of 58.8% of the entire rc3 patch.
Early distributions which picked it up#
OpenWrt became the first distribution to pick up ath9k and contribute to it.
Other sections#
- Devices
- Bugs
- Power consumption
- Bluetooth Coexistence
- Antenna Diversity
- Wake on WLAN
- DFS
- Debugging
- Products with supported ath9k cards
- ath.ko module
- RHEL
- initvals-tool
- Spectral scan
Youtube presentations about ath9k internals by Adrian Chadd, see Documentation