Linux 4.10's ath9k Driver Should Have Lower Latency & Less Bufferbloat

As part of the ongoing battle with bufferbloat are some improvements to the ath9k WiFi driver with the Linux 4.10 kernel.

Bufferbloat is the excess buffering of packets resulting in high latency, jitter, and lower network throughput. We've been looking forward to some more bufferbloat improvements with the Linux kernel and its network drivers while there were some ath9k improvements I hadn't noticed until being pointed out this week by a Phoronix reader.

So on top of all the covered features of Linux 4.10 I've written about the past few weeks, there's also an interesting change for ath9k. As mentioned with this pull, "switch to use mac80211 intermediate software queues to reduce latency and fix bufferbloat."

The ath9k driver is what supports many of the Atheros 802.11n PCI/PCI-E WiFi devices within the Linux kernel. Great to see this popular driver getting reduced latency and bufferbloat fixing for the next kernel release.