Re: [Make-wifi-fast] a cheer up tweet for y'all

[Bob McMahon <bob.mcmahon@broadcom.com>]

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> Well, the original context of the question was "Linux WiFi drivers are
> terrible, what can we do about that", and, well, providing proper
> upstream drivers at HW launch is the way to solve that.

This is out of the scope of chip makers for modern chips. The os drivers
are written by system integrators - specialization has divided these tasks.
Chip makers don't affect open vs closed source drivers of systems.  Think
of a WiFi chip now as transistors with a small microcontroller and not a
linux NIC.

One can argue that chip makers don't provide documents to open-source
developers, which is mostly accurate. But documents aren't the blocker.

I think an open source community would have to innovate to a level to drive
the use of chips coming off a foundry line for a chip maker to consider
assigning resources to support open-source teams. Old chips with 10+ year
old NRE doesn't justify any investment by anyone.

I think the server market & structure & level of cloud innovation make
things different for ethernet NICs.

Bob


On Wed, Jan 10, 2024 at 3:23 AM Toke Høiland-Jørgensen <toke@toke.dk> wrote:

> Bob McMahon <bob.mcmahon@broadcom.com> writes:
>
> > This approach is not going to work. Sun workstations as the forwarding
> > planes for WiFi doesn't work nor scale and is cost & power inefficient.
> The
> > WiFi forwarding plane needs to be all hardware and not based off of BSD.
> It
> > has to be like a port asic in an ethernet switch. No SoC.
> >
> > Ethernet NICs are targeting servers where the workstation/NIC model does
> > work. WiFi is never going to be the basis for cloud servers.
>
> Well, the original context of the question was "Linux WiFi drivers are
> terrible, what can we do about that", and, well, providing proper
> upstream drivers at HW launch is the way to solve that.
>
> And even so, every Linux-based CPE in existence is a contradiction of
> you assertion that software-based WiFi forwarding is "not going to
> work". On the contrary, the SOCs with proper open source drivers and
> support are the ones that work the best, because that means we can run
> OpenWrt on them instead of the vendor crapware that they ship with.
>
> -Toke
>

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