[ath9k-devel] Request for help: gui toolkit creation for atheros PHY/MAC statistics

[Ben Greear]

On 03/23/2012 10:07 AM, Adrian Chadd wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'd like some help in writing a GUI toolkit for recording, playing
> back and visualising some of the PHY/MAC statistics the Atheros NICs
> expose.
>
> What I can do: help with the MAC/PHY side of things, identify what
> initial things would be good to support and what would actually be
> useful.
> What I can't do: dedicate time to write a GUI. :-)
> What I'd like to see: something completely free/open source written so
> we can improve the foss wireless development process.
> (Why I'm doing this: I'm fed up staring at printf() debugging in
> ath9k/FreeBSD and it's hard to have others visualise what's going on
> ..)
>
> I'd like it to be in C++/QT (before you ask - if you can make python
> or ${OTHER_LANG} handle the sheer rates of wifi traffic, MAC counters
> and PHY errors, _live_, and on tablet/atom class hardware, then please
> by all means do so..) and I'd like it to be platform portable. That
> way it can be used as a visualisation tool on other platforms, even if
> it's unable to do live capture itself (think MacOSX/Windows.)

I wouldn't ask someone to do it and then tell them what language.  Just suggest
to them what it needs to do instead.

The big question for me is:  How do you propose to get the info out
of the driver and up to user-space?

Just in case it matters...while benchmarking my Linux ethtool patch to ath9k,
I found it took around 35us to make the ethtool ioctl call to get the
stats.  This was on a dual-core Atom system.

Thanks,
Ben

-- 
Ben Greear <greearb at candelatech.com>
Candela Technologies Inc  http://www.candelatech.com