TL-WN722N support on FreeBSD.

[Adrian Chadd]

The problem -is- the money. The people will come when there's enough
interest and enough money.

The problem is that people think things like wifi drivers that are
debugged, perform well and get updated as new standards appear is a
few months effort - and I think the herculean efforts done in the past
by people like Sam fuel this myth.

I've spent almost two years of weekends and evenings hacking on
net80211 and the atheros driver to get it to where it is. The 11n
support for atheros chips appeared when someone (hi Hobnob!) paid me
for six months to get 11n done. I'm still debugging weird corner cases
with rate control and congestion handling even now. And this is _on
top_ of all the work done by the Atheros team to write the HAL in the
first place.

I've spent almost 18 months of weekends/evenings hacking on the intel
iwn driver to find all the little odd corner cases that make it
unusable by a lot of people. I keep saying I'm not, but since the
laptops I'm using have iwn in them, I end up getting annoyed enough to
fix it. This has all been for free.

Wireless stuff is a very complicated, very time consuming thing that's
immensely fun if you're into this kind of thing. But please understand
- it's a huge time commitment for each individual device and new
standard.

So yes, it's the money. I've jokingly said that it's $100k and 2 years
for me in (evenings, weekends) time and equipment to port and debug
one driver for a given NIC. Not just do a "oh look here's an openbsd
driver ported from linux in a month" port - that's just the beginning
(and I tend to quote something like $10k for that) - I mean, something
that ends up implementing the updated standards (11n, 11ac soon);
something that includes powersave, something that includes debugging,
something that handles a multitude of bad environments that people see
every day and complain about. Ie - the level of work that makes it "oh
it just works, I can get on with work now" level of work.

I don't want to let myself be dragged into another two years of
weekends. I kind of need some sleep here and there.



-a