On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 10:39 AM, camden lindsay <[email protected]> wrote: > When looking at routers for high noise applications, keep in mind the > frequent complaints of wireless instability on routers with atheros chipsets > due to a number of known and unknown driver bugs. > > Both of the above routers (and it seems _most_ of the routers supporting > dual band that are reasonably priced) use Atheros chipsets. > > See https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/9654 for more information on Atheros > bugs.
While those are obviously serious bugs you don't EVER want to run non-Atheros hardware on linux.[1] You might think ath9k is bad because it's failing on that linksys hardware but it's orders of magnitude better then any other drivers we have. OpenWRT is always advancing, we might get by with binary drivers if we never updated anything (userland and kernel wise). But that's not how we roll. Broadcom was shit FOR YEARS until b43 got decent. And I think Realtek still has issues with lockups or slow link speeds. To be fair Intel is great for clients and ok for APs, just don't try and do anything fancy in monitor mode. And even with all of this, we still have nbd who practically works for Atheros fixing bugs and writing support for new chipsets. None of the other drivers really have the backing atheros does in kernel. If you report a bug well (like with a easy to trigger test case) it will probably get fixed within a week or two. Good luck with that kind of turn around on the binary blob drivers, and most of the other OSS drivers will still keep you waiting a month assuming they don't lose the patch. I have one broadcom based router that's been retired WRT54GS, everything since that is atheros based or I'm buying atheros cards for it (multiple WNDR3700s, WDR4300 at home[new favourite, thing is on sale for under $70 constantly 3stream 450mbs], wl-500g atheros retrofit, TEW-652BRP, rs-pros with SR-71As, Laguna GW2388 with SR-71As, every laptop or desktop I own gets atheros minipcie cards, etc etc). Atheros drivers _might_ suck. But you never want to deal with the levels of suck involved with the other chipsets in production.</rant> [1] the exception to this being USB devices where atheros is hard to find. Ralink has a good nbd equivalent writing drivers, I believe his name is Larry Finger. _______________________________________________ openwrt-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openwrt.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openwrt-users
