On Thu, Jan 23, 2025 at 02:36:06PM -0800, Steve Williams wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am trying to troubleshoot some wifi issues I am having and need to do a
> process of elimination.
>
> I figure I can add a USB wireless to my OpenBSD box
>
> What is a well supported USB wireless adapter for OpenBSD that has a
> reasonable chance of running in as an access point?
>
> This is not a high volume application, it's only on a 15 M (bidirectional)
> connection.
>
> I can read the man pages, but when buying online, they seldom say what the
> "guts" are inside these things, so I was hoping for a manufacturer and
> model.
>
> And yes, I know this is hit & miss. I accept all risks! lol.
>
> Thanks,
> Steve W.
>
>
You could try a device based on the AR9271 chipset supported by athn(4).
Searching the web for AR9271 should return some things you can buy.
There are some limitations. The AR9271 is limited to 2GHz. We haven't yet
implemented support for 11n Tx aggregation or 40 MHz channels in our driver,
which makes 11n mode no faster than 11g/11a modes in practice.
(I would welcome patches which improve this situation. It needs a software
A-MPDU scheduler in the kernel. Other devices we support in 11n and 11ac
modes do this scheduling entirely in firmware, and so far we lack an
implementation of this in our kernel. Having this in place would help make
11n/11ac possible in other drivers, too, such as a WIP mediatek one.)
And there is a limit of 7 concurrent clients imposed by firmware due to
limited on-device memory resources.
As a nice touch, the firmware is free software, see the
devel/open-ath9k-htc-firmware/ port for details. If there are firmware-level
issues then someone with enough time and dedication might be able to fix them.
There is also the AR7010, a more capable version with 5GHz support.
But those are very difficult to track down. If you can find one then
definitely get it, and if you find more than one then please send at
least one to an openbsd wifi developer.
Alternatively, there are USB adapters supported by bwfm(4), which are not
very easy to track down either. These would do proper 11n mode and perhaps
even 11ac mode. Some of these devices might lack support for hostap mode
in firmware, I believe. The "Raspberry Pi 2" wifi dongle (WLU6331) supports
hsotap mode (2 GHZ only, so no 11ac) and attaches as bwfm(4).
I don't know how well it works in practice. There are known performance
issues in client mode. This firmware is huge and closed-source.
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