linux-kernel - Re: Free Linux Driver Development!

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Message-ID: <f2b55d220702010948r16c48bdcsadc7c8492e36dd4e@mail.gmail.com>
Date:	Thu, 1 Feb 2007 09:48:30 -0800
From:	"Michael K. Edwards" <medwards.linux@...il.com>
To:	"Lennart Sorensen" <lsorense@...lub.uwaterloo.ca>
Cc:	"Michael Buesch" <mb@...sch.de>, "Jeff Garzik" <jeff@...zik.org>,
	"Roland Dreier" <rdreier@...co.com>, "Greg KH" <greg@...ah.com>,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Free Linux Driver Development!

On 2/1/07, Lennart Sorensen <lsorense@...lub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
> Sometimes I might be.  At least on the days I have to deal with problems
> in Windows (it's not even my machine, so I don't get to pick what it
> runs all the time. :)  I haven't had particularly much luck getting a
> stable wireless going on linux yet, although I haven't put much effort
> into it yet either.  I figure in a couple of years there will be so many
> wifi devices around that wireless won't work anymore anyhow so it isn't
> a high priority.  I like simple trustworthy wires.

For what it's worth, hostap + Prism chips of various kinds has worked
quite solidly for 7-8 years or so, and I shipped handheld products
with it in 2001 or so and ran all of my wireless infrastructure gear
on it until I switched to off-the-shelf Broadcom- and Atheros-based
gear a couple of years ago (running OpenWRT and variants thereof).
The apparent inability of any wireless vendor to fix a low-level
firmware bug without breaking at least one common order of operations
in the driver API is hardly Linux's fault.

As it stands, there's enough of a learning and fiddling curve with
every WiFi driver that it's usually not very time-efficient to get
WiFi working under Linux on any single box that shipped with Windows.
But given a controlled configuration and some up-front time
investment, it's not that hard to switch over your local environment
(my neighbors and I have a WDS mesh set up), at which point you may be
the only people within RF range whose WiFi doesn't go belly-up when
some mangled frame comes along.  In this case, it's the last 20% of
the effort that produces 80% of the value.  (Bye-bye, telco monopoly;
the only live wires remaining into our house are the AC mains.)

Cheers,
- Michael
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