
Bringing up 802.11ac on FreeBSD - tdurden
https://adrianchadd.blogspot.com/2017/04/bringing-up-80211ac-on-freebsd.html
======
rufugee
How does...one reach this level of understanding in systems programming? My
coursework in this area was very general at best. Are there any courses out
there that focus on this theory-meets-real-world level that you folks would
recommend? Would prefer one in Linux, but I'm not that picky.

Or does one just happen into these jobs as an apprentice and spend years
learning on the job?

~~~
sohkamyung
Yes, it's learning on the job.

In the specific case of 802.11 (different from 'Wi-Fi' which is a marketing
term from the Wi-Fi consortium), you'll also need to be familiar with the IEEE
802.11 specifications. You can do this by putting aside a block of time to
read parts of the actual specs [1], supplemented by the O'Reilly 802.11 books
by Matthew Gast [2] which I found to be really helpful during my time working
with various 802.11 modules.

[1] [
[http://standards.ieee.org/about/get/802/802.11.html](http://standards.ieee.org/about/get/802/802.11.html)
]

[2] [ [http://www.oreilly.com/pub/au/692](http://www.oreilly.com/pub/au/692) ]

~~~
merb
wow specs that are free.. in the wireless world a lot of specs are free, as I
just googled. however later that day I worked with NXP NTAG's 213-216 and
tried to figure out more specifications especially about NDEF and they were
put behind big paywalls. very very sad ([http://nfc-forum.org/our-
work/specifications-and-application...](http://nfc-forum.org/our-
work/specifications-and-application-documents/specifications/nfc-forum-
technical-specifications/)) I always wonder how to push such technologies, if
you can't implement it without paying. it's just akward.

------
sydney6
Adrian Chadd is FreeBSD's Wireless One-Man-Army. Awesome stuff.

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floatboth
> If I chose, say, the Intel 11ac parts then I'd have to implement a lot more
> of the fiddly stuff to get good behaviour

Okay, I'll have to wait another year to get 11ac on my laptop :) It's not,
like, super critical to me, 11a is enough for most daily tasks and for e.g.
system upgrades I just connect to Ethernet (BTW it's super easy to set up
seamless handover between Wi-Fi and Ethernet on FreeBSD, using link
aggregation)

Nice work, Adrian!

------
atemerev
"When men were men, and wrote their own device drivers..." — Linus Torvalds

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ori_b
Hah. It wasn't so long ago that I heard Adrian swearing he would _NOT_ be
writing an Atheros driver.

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dingdingdang
Hats off to people who are skilled enough, and have the will, to implement
these things in open source.

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gigatexal
Sweet! This is a badly needed feature

