Date: Tue, 9 Sep 2014 13:53:10 +0800 From: Kevin Lo <kevlo@FreeBSD.org> To: Adrian Chadd <adrian@freebsd.org> Cc: "freebsd-wireless@freebsd.org" <freebsd-wireless@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: TL-WN722N support on FreeBSD. Message-ID: <20140909055310.GA18936@ns.kevlo.org> 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>
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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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