Date: Thu, 4 Sep 2014 04:39:17 +1000 (EST) From: Ian Smith <smithi@nimnet.asn.au> To: Adrian Chadd <adrian@freebsd.org> Cc: "freebsd-wireless@freebsd.org" <freebsd-wireless@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: TL-WN722N support on FreeBSD. Message-ID: <20140904032042.Y58647@sola.nimnet.asn.au> In-Reply-To: <CAJ-Vmom_T-BJTf4c8z0LY6syG3X%2B62ZAx=hmna2Y6_rmmoDb%2BQ@mail.gmail.com> 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>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Mon, 1 Sep 2014 11:11:20, 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 $10k for that) - I mean, something > that ends up implementing the updated standards (11n, 11ac soon); > something that includes powersave, something that includes debugging, > something that handles a multitude of bad environments that people see > every day and complain about. Ie - the level of work that makes it "oh > it just works, I can get on with work now" level of work. > > I don't want to let myself be dragged into another two years of > weekends. I kind of need some sleep here and there. Thanks for this, and for all your work, Adrian. Let the M$ troll in questions@ crow that ew're not keeping up with his multi$Bn corp .. Volunteerism has its limits, and noone can meet the illspecified and neverending demands for more. Get some sleep here and there, short of starving. Someone whinging 'when are you coming to bed?' helps :) cheers, Ian
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20140904032042.Y58647>