Monday, September 07, 2009

AR9285 driver for linux

The Atheros AR9285 driver, ath9k, is barely usable in Fedora 12 Alpha and Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha. I've been using the Ubuntu on the Gateway LT31. The wireless will fail under heavy load. I've not tested F12 Snapshot 1 yet, but I don't expect much better behaviour. There's a bugzilla entry for it. The number is 520539.


Update 2009-09-26: I updated my install of Ubuntu 9.10 alpha and received that latest interface changes and such. Suspends seem to be working. However, I have to use the NetworkManager applet to stop the networking and start it again before I get acceptable performance leves out of it.

I've not tried Fedora 12 Snapshot 3, but 2 works about as well as the Snapshot 1. I've noticed that the I have to restart the NetworkManager applet know matter what laptop I try. I don't know if it's the LiveCD or what. I'll wait until F12 Beta comes out before I try it again. FYI, I've been using unetbootin to test F12. If you use unetbootin, make sure that you re-label the USB key's volume name to LIVE.

Update 2009-10-10:Using the Fedora 20091007 nightly of the desktop livecd, I was able to get reasonable performance after a suspend/resume of the card. I need to do a throughput test to see if it works now. I'm able to use the desktop affects on fedora which I can't on Ubuntu.

Update 2009-10-25:I've moved over to using Fedora 12 Beta. (Sorry Ubuntu.) Performance of the card isn't what I would like it to be, but it is working. It continues to disconnect from the AP under heavy load, but will reconnect. Transferring a large files will cause it to disconnect 2 - 3 times per minute. I've updated the Fedora Bug report. Fedora 12 works reasonably well and I can enable the 3D effects for the desktop with the open source driver.

Update 2010-05-01: I'm now running Fedora 13 Beta. The card hasn't given me any issues. The Gateway LT31 seems to be working reasonably well. I haven't had a corruption issue with the ATI video while using the opensource driver. So far so good.

Update 2010-12-31: I've tried the the AR9285 with a N router. I was pushing almost 13MB/s (~90Mbps) when sitting about 5 feet away. I had to set the router to N only with Turbo enabled.

2 comments:

Alex said...

Any luck in getting a more stable version of the atheros driver?

James Hubbard said...

It seems to be working better with updates to F12. It's still not as good as the Intel drivers. I was able to transfer stuff across the link at a much better speeds.