> This is a long way of saying, that if performance sucks on OpenWrt you > should blame Atheros and Broadcom for not giving you (OpenWrt > community) high quality open source drivers!
First thanks to Alex, Charlie, Kathy and Fernando for pointing out that Atheros works together with Linux and OpenWrt developers and that they are very valued member of the community. I agree with you 100%, we should value all members that contribute to supporting open source. >From my own hands-on experience with Ubiquiti, Mikrotik, TPLink and other devices that are based on Atheros is that they usually have better performance with stock firmware. Also killer feature for some wifi applications is TDMA protocol, which Ubiquiti, Mikrotik and other device manufacturers support but OpenWrt doesn't support (but this is completely different topic). I knew that Atheros contributed to open source drivers, but there are lots of reviews and benchmarks that show how much performance difference there is between some (not all) devices when running OpenWrt. Our brains are wired for comparison, so they automatically attribute labels like "bad", "worse", "slower", "not as good as original" when using OpenWrt - I have seen this too many times on forums to give you few specific links to discussions, just dive into forums and you will see this for yourselves. I understand some reasons for part of performance hit and I can live with that. But I also know that performance could be improved because companies that produce open source drivers don't have best possible OpenWrt performance as their top priority. Top managers in most companies don't believe that having best possible performance in OpenWrt (and allocating enough engineer hours for that task) will make them more money. Simple as that. In contrast to this - other companies like Linksys, Mikrotik, Ubiquiti, TPLink and others that have wifi products definitely give top priority to how much performance they can sqeeze out of their devices, and allocate enough engineer hours to make their performance as fast as possible. Unfortunately they value their closed source driver. Can anyone explain to me how NDAs come into this? Because I remember one discussions with Mikrotik developer who said that they can't release their Atheros driver that they developed as open source because they signed NDA with Atheros? Is Atheros giving some "secret" and proprietary information to companies that sign NDA with them? If this is true then we will never have as fast performance as companies that sign NDAs. v. _______________________________________________ openwrt-devel mailing list openwrt-devel@lists.openwrt.org https://lists.openwrt.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openwrt-devel