Go back –> Atheros Linux wireless drivers
ath9k is a completely FOSS wireless driver for all Atheros IEEE 802.11n PCI/PCI-Express and AHB WLAN based chipsets.
You should subscribe to this page so you can get e-mail updates on changes and news for ath9k automatically. You'll get an e-mail as soon as this page gets updated.
linux-wireless is the recommended mailing list to use.
The archives for the old ath9k-devel list, which was closed in 2017, are available:
ath9k is part of the kernel, but the latest version can be obtained from backports.
To enable ath9k, you must first enable mac80211 through make menuconfig when compiling your kernel. If you do not know what this means then please learn to compile kernels or rely on your Linux distribution's kernel. Below are the options you need to enable ath9k through make menuconfig.
Networking ---> Wireless ---> <M> Improved wireless configuration API <M> Generic IEEE 802.11 Networking Stack (mac80211)
You can then enable ath9k in the kernel configuration under
Device Drivers ---> [*] Network device support ---> Wireless LAN ---> Atheros Wireless Cards ----> <M> Atheros 802.11n wireless cards support
SB = single-band 2.4GHz
DB = dual-band 2.4GHz or 5GHz
See the ath9k device list.
All of these modes of operation are supported and should work on all ath9k cards.
ath9k was announced to have been merged into Linux-2.6.27-rc3 by Linus on Tue, 12 Aug 2008 19:33:16 -0700 (PDT), and consisted of 58.8% of the entire rc3 patch.
For more information please see: