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Date:      Mon, 8 Sep 2014 23:33:31 -0700
From:      Adrian Chadd <adrian@freebsd.org>
To:        Kevin Lo <kevlo@freebsd.org>
Cc:        freebsd-wireless@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: TL-WN722N support on FreeBSD.
Message-ID:  <CAJ-Vmo=9e8mZPit6eZwBLga8tW34EbrjQLYmAHZR7bZUPa2UJw@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20140909055310.GA18936@ns.kevlo.org>
References:  <C18F5819-A884-4A86-9FBA-FF7CEFF70695@gmail.com> <CAJ-VmombJ8Ky8Lmj70YgUH7%2BfQkiwJQ9XyD7OqfkYfx7=OfdcA@mail.gmail.com> <20140830195721.GA12450@neutralgood.org> <CAJ-Vmonu2T9qK-XFn4qEeikN4HYz4rySFL%2BdJYxBkss%2B2O0xpg@mail.gmail.com> <5403AD08.60605@pinyon.org> <20140901105350.GJ57121@e-new.0x20.net> <CAJ-Vmom_T-BJTf4c8z0LY6syG3X%2B62ZAx=hmna2Y6_rmmoDb%2BQ@mail.gmail.com> <20140909055310.GA18936@ns.kevlo.org>

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Oh it is fun. :)

+a
On Sep 8, 2014 10:54 PM, "Kevin Lo" <kevlo@freebsd.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 01, 2014 at 11:11:20AM -0700, Adrian Chadd wrote:
> >
> > The problem -is- the money. The people will come when there's enough
> > interest and enough money.
> >
> > The problem is that people think things like wifi drivers that are
> > debugged, perform well and get updated as new standards appear is a
> > few months effort - and I think the herculean efforts done in the past
> > by people like Sam fuel this myth.
> >
> > I've spent almost two years of weekends and evenings hacking on
> > net80211 and the atheros driver to get it to where it is. The 11n
> > support for atheros chips appeared when someone (hi Hobnob!) paid me
> > for six months to get 11n done. I'm still debugging weird corner cases
> > with rate control and congestion handling even now. And this is _on
> > top_ of all the work done by the Atheros team to write the HAL in the
> > first place.
> >
> > I've spent almost 18 months of weekends/evenings hacking on the intel
> > iwn driver to find all the little odd corner cases that make it
> > unusable by a lot of people. I keep saying I'm not, but since the
> > laptops I'm using have iwn in them, I end up getting annoyed enough to
> > fix it. This has all been for free.
> >
> > Wireless stuff is a very complicated, very time consuming thing that's
> > immensely fun if you're into this kind of thing. But please understand
> > - it's a huge time commitment for each individual device and new
> > standard.
> >
> > So yes, it's the money. I've jokingly said that it's $100k and 2 years
> > for me in (evenings, weekends) time and equipment to port and debug
> > one driver for a given NIC. Not just do a "oh look here's an openbsd
> > driver ported from linux in a month" port - that's just the beginning
> > (and I tend to quote something like $10k for that) - I mean, something
> > that ends up implementing the updated standards (11n, 11ac soon);
> > something that includes powersave, something that includes debugging,
> > something that handles a multitude of bad environments that people see
> > every day and complain about. Ie - the level of work that makes it "oh
> > it just works, I can get on with work now" level of work.
> >
> > I don't want to let myself be dragged into another two years of
> > weekends. I kind of need some sleep here and there.
>
> I can't find a reason why I disagree with you.
> I have almost forgotten that wifi hacking can be fun if it results
> in something working...
>
> > -a
>
>         Kevin
>



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