Chipset with the best support?

I'm in the market for a new all-in-one wireless ap. Which manufactures seem to best support the open source community? Is there a Wi-Fi chipset that its support stands out as complete and robust?

My thinking is without quality supported Wi-Fi that everything else in the system is irrelevant.

Ath9k is the best supported, though getting old now.

Then ath10k, then mt76

2 Likes

they never will be old

Compared to what 802.11ac and 802.11ax bring to the table in terms of raw performance (both the wireless throughput and the CPU performance (~= routing throughput), flash size and RAM size that go hand in hand with the newer wireless chipsets), 802.11n (~= ath9k) has indeed gotten very old by now. Yes, there is a quite major advantage for ath9k on the driver side, but that doesn't really mean much in comparison to contemporary performance.

As an aside, in summer I had to use a few systems (fast x86_64 workstations, with plenty of storage), which are normally hard-wired to my network, over wireless for a couple of months, because wifi is usually unecessary in these devices, they only had old (ath9k based-) ar9285 (1x1) and ar5008 (2x3:2) equipped - this was not a pleasant experience at all. In comparison, (slower-) systems using ax200/ ax210 Intel (client-) cards remained usable almost without restrictions (a little more laggy, but very decent performance), both in a 802.11ac environment (AP) and in a 802.11ax environment (AP). Admittedly, 2.4 GHz vs 5 GHz and HT20 vs HT40/ VHT80/ HE80 also left their mark, but even 802.11ax over 2.4 GHz (HE20) was a very noticable difference to the better.