Current state of recent wireless cards

[Emmanuel Vadot]

On Mon, 13 Jul 2020 10:34:51 +0000
"Bjoern A. Zeeb" <bz at FreeBSD.org> wrote:

> On 10 Jul 2020, at 21:33, Emmanuel Vadot wrote:
> 
> >  That's a bit optimistic that attach and firmware loading is half of
> > the work no ?
> >  I don't know how much linuxkpi layer is needed for 80211 compat but I
> > guess it's "a lot" ?
> 
> Part of that ?lot? is that as Adrian also indicates the net80211 
> parts also
> need doing as otherwise you cannot write the compat on top and that 
> makes
> it hard to estimate how much will be compat or native yet.

 I though that your plan was to have every compat needed in linuxkpi to
port/update drivers more easily.
 Also I'm not really talking about AC here, just doing linuxkpi compat
for what's already needed for G is still a lot (and needed for iwlwifi).

> Also given along with ath10k this is the ?first? bits to do this in 
> FreeBSD
> it?ll always take longer than doing a 2nd or 3rd driver.
> 
> >  IIRC Linux have multiple 80211 framework no ?
> 
> Well kind-of layered: mac80211 / cfg80211 and the user space config
> stuff in nl80211 and I?d almost thought intermangled add the entire
> regdomain parts.
> https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org has at least some overview there.
> 
> 
> >  I guess your work only focus on one (used by iwlwifi), do you know 
> > how
> > many drivers used the same one ? What about FullMAC drivers like the
> > SDIO broadcom one used in many ARM SBC, is that using the same
> > framework ?
> 
> The Broadcom driver could be a great deal easier to port than it is.
> It will be easier to port with this as some parts are already covered
> as a result of this and more will be.  The SDIO parts for the fmac are
> not part of this as the Intel work is PCI-only but those were done last
> year already. 

 So you have linuxkpi code for linux mmcstack -> mmccam ? Or are you
just talking about mmccam sdio functionality ?

> I am currently trying to get my hands-on a PCI card as
> well as I hope that might speed up some things.
> 
> On another note, I was able to get the rtw88 driver compile in under a
> day based on the iwlwifi.   That?s kind-of an ideal case, other 
> drivers
> would need more time (and it?ll highly depend on whether that is other
> Linux or other WiFi bits).

 Compile and working ?
 Because that's easy to compile code if you add a lot of dummy stub
functions.

> 
> I had done a comparison after the initial iwlwifi work based on compile
> time errors for a few Dual BSD-GPL or ISC or similarly friendly licensed
> drivers:  the order was iwlwifi < rtw88 < ath11k < ath10k < brcmfmac in
> terms of individual errors and functions missing/to implement.  I also
> had numbers of how much the iwlwifi work had reduced all this but they
> are outdated.
> 
> I also looked at the mt7601u GPL driver (as the hope is that some of 
> these
> could also be ported more quickly and possibly live outside the tree but
> at least be avail) and it wasn?t too bad either.  A handful of extra 
> WiFi
> constants and 6 or so functions and then the usual Linux noise on top.
> 
> 
> /bz


-- 
Emmanuel Vadot <manu at bidouilliste.com>