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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