Date: Mon, 27 Apr 2020 10:18:25 -0400 From: waddlesplash <waddlesplash@gmail.com> Cc: freebsd-wireless@freebsd.org Subject: Re: pondering WiFi forwards Message-ID: <CAEesM76FFmOWdS6UjgncgwLK0rJ0ZAebzkXr0kRB0r3XiAO5dA@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <67FD6C98-7C30-463B-A052-4CC7F9FFD5CD@FreeBSD.org> References: <67FD6C98-7C30-463B-A052-4CC7F9FFD5CD@FreeBSD.org>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Hi, On Mon, Apr 27, 2020 at 9:58 AM Bjoern A. Zeeb <bz@freebsd.org> wrote: > FreeBSD has downstream consumers, Haiku, RTEMS (to my knowledge), NetBSD > is synching from us as well [4] and I hope we can extend this > =E2=80=9Csynching=E2=80=9D more into collaborations and stay on the same = page > all-together also with the other BSDs in the future. > Speaking here as the current maintainer (though not the first, the work up to about FreeBSD 9 was someone else, I was responsible for the 9 -> 11 upgrade as well as a lot of internal overhauls since then) of the Haiku WiFi stack, which is indeed almost entirely a port of the FreeBSD one via a KPI compatibility layer: Part of the reason that Haiku decided to use FreeBSD ethernet and WiFi drivers and invest the time in a FreeBSD KPI layer, as opposed to Linux's, was partially due to licensing (Haiku is MIT, though we do use a lot of GPL utilities in userland), but almost equally because of our attitudes towards code quality and style. Linux driver code quality was then (i.e. about 13 or so years ago when the decision was being made, before my time), and is now, kind of atrocious, partially because so much of it is vendors just dumping code into the kernel and it usually "works", though often unreliably or with poor performance... I know you are being rather vague here about what kind of "alignment" you are talking about. If you mean incremental changes to the net80211 stack to get it to look more like mac80211 or something, I don't really have much of an opinion there (Haiku uses net80211 wholesale, with of course an ieee80211_haiku.cpp to interface with our own systems, so any changes will get pulled in without much effort.) But if you mean moving WiFi onto linuxkpi ... well ... we'd be sorry to see the old stack go, to say the least... As for collaboration: The only driver bugfixes we have (almost entirely made by me) were already upstreamed into FreeBSD one way or another, and I continue to remain diligent about that. (IIRC at the point we upgraded to FreeBSD 11 drivers, there were some broken iwn chipsets with trivial fixes that apparently nobody had noticed on FreeBSD, so our install base may have more variance in WiFi cards than FreeBSD, by some metric!) We don't have the manpower to really contribute much to WiFi drivers themselves. Financial support would be another matter; if we had a way to specifically earmark funding for WiFi, and only WiFi (or at least, WiFi plus less-maintained ethernet drivers), I could petition our Inc. to donate, and the community at large, too. It wouldn't be a lot, but if you are only part-time anyway, perhaps a modest amount could go a long way, anyway. -waddlesplash
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?CAEesM76FFmOWdS6UjgncgwLK0rJ0ZAebzkXr0kRB0r3XiAO5dA>