Linux 6.5 Continues Making Preparations For WiFi 7, Enabling New Hardware

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linux 6.5 Continues Making Preparations For WiFi 7, Enabling New Hardware

The Linux 6.5 networking subsystem changes include more preparations around the ongoing WiFi 7 wireless standard as well as bringing up support for a number of newer network adapters...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/WiFi-7-Linux-6.5

[kylew77]

It is gonna be 2038 before any *BSD gets wifi 7... OpenBSD just recently got ac support for Intel iwx driver based wifi cards and honestly that is enough for a 100Mbs Internet connection so ac is good enough for me!

[dlq84]

Remember when support for wifi on Linux was so terrible that one didn't even bother trying? Seems like such a distant past now that we have support for wifi7 long before the final specification is released.

[timofonic]

What's WiFi7 really iseful for? It's said to have kess latency, more bandwidth and more interference resilient. Are there something more than that? What about security

What about merging it with WiGig/mmWave/IEEE 802.11ad/IEEE 802.11ay/802.11me802.11ah/UWB/WirelessHD/WirelessUSB/etc and kill Bluetooth with fire finally? I hate Bluetooth.

It is gonna be 2038 before any *BSD gets wifi 7... OpenBSD just recently got ac support for Intel iwx driver based wifi cards and honestly that is enough for a 100Mbs Internet connection so ac is good enough for me!

Do BSDs live in the past? Aren't they mainly focused at networking and server stuff? Anyway, offtopic.

[kylew77]

Do BSDs live in the past? Aren't they mainly focused at networking and server stuff? Anyway, offtopic.

Not off topic, poor wifi is listed as a hindrance to FreeBSD and OpenBSD adoption. Fewer wifi chips are supported and frequently only at n or g speeds.

[Widefox]

What's WiFi7 really iseful for? It's said to have kess latency, more bandwidth and more interference resilient. Are there something more than that? What about security

Latency. We have Gb/s speeds with WiFi 6 but still an order of magnitude more latency than wired GbE. WiFi 7 promises two order of magnitude less latency than 6 due to Multi-Link Operation (MLO). That's the promise, but I'd like to see real world numbers when there's other clients associated with the same AP. I'd still rather have a single full-duplex wired link than multiple half-duplex time-shared WiFi links (with Multi-Link Operation).

In practice, I can only boot 6.5 by either blacklisting my WiFi (6) driver or turning off in the BIOS since the 28th, so still early days.

[Franco Castillo]

Latency. We have Gb/s speeds with WiFi 6 but still an order of magnitude more latency than wired GbE. WiFi 7 promises two order of magnitude less latency than 6 due to Multi-Link Operation (MLO). That's the promise, but I'd like to see real world numbers when there's other clients associated with the same AP. I'd still rather have a single full-duplex wired link than multiple half-duplex time-shared WiFi links (with Multi-Link Operation).

In practice, I can only boot 6.5 by either blacklisting my WiFi (6) driver or turning off in the BIOS since the 28th, so still early days.

Couldn't you achieve a kind of Full-Duplex with MLO?

[Widefox]

Couldn't you achieve a kind of Full-Duplex with MLO?

Multiple shared half-duplex links sound similar, but as each link is still a shared medium ie half-duplex, each radio is not always allowed to send, meaning latency.

Contrasted with wired Ethernet which is dual-simplex (ie full-duplex).