Qualcomm Publishes New ath10k 802.11ac Driver

Qualcomm developers have posted their new mac80211 driver for the Qualcomm Atheros QCA98xx 802.11ac wireless adapters for use with the Linux kernel.

Compared to the commonly-used Atheros ath9k driver, a firmware now needs to be loaded for this new 802.11ac Atheros network hardware, which made it necessary to implement the hardware support in the fork of a new driver, which is dubbed ath10k.

This is actually the first time this open-source mac80211 driver is being posted, but it didn't get much attention or developer comments the first time around. The developers responsible for this Qualcomm Atheros 802.11ac CQA98xx wireless driver hope this second version of the driver is ready and can be merged soon -- perhaps for Linux 3.11.

The current ath10k patches for the Qualcomm Atheros 802.11ac QCA98xx driver can be found on the linux-wireless mailing list.