An open-source ath11k driver patch series for Qualcomm Wi-Fi 6 hardware delivers up to seven times lower latency, while also offering higher throughput at comparable latency.
Open-source developer Julius Bairaktaris is working on a patch series for the Linux ath11k wireless driver used by Qualcomm Wi-Fi 6 and 802.11ax chipsets. The changes address the driver’s current queue-management limitations, which can cause network traffic to remain in hardware transmit queues without adequate active queue management or flow separation.
The patch series brings the queue back under mac80211 control, allowing the networking stack to manage queued traffic more effectively. In testing on a Qualcomm IPQ8074 access point serving a single HE station, the default driver achieved about 94.6 Mbit/s with 155 ms latency. With the patches and an appropriate queue limit, latency dropped to around 22 ms while maintaining 74.3 Mbit/s throughput.
The changes also include completion-driven scheduling, which improves throughput at comparable latency. According to the reported measurements, this part of the patch series can provide up to 2.2 times higher throughput at the same latency under the tested conditions. The overall patch series consists of nine patches adding just over 150 lines of code.
The improvements target mechanisms that are currently inactive for ath11k because the driver does not advertise the required mac80211 features for airtime fairness and airtime queue limits. As a result, saturated downloads can place queued data directly into hardware transmission rings, where the existing queue management cannot provide the same level of flow separation.
The ath11k changes are currently under review on the Linux kernel mailing list. The work demonstrates how relatively small changes to an open-source wireless driver can significantly affect network responsiveness, particularly under saturated traffic conditions. The patch series was also assisted by Claude Opus 5 during development.
