ath(4) HAL in -current vs 5.0

[Stephen Borrill <netbsd%precedence.co.uk@localhost>]

I've been running NetBSD 5.0 with Jared's ath patch on an EeePC 900A. 
Today I tried using wi-fi in anger and saw I was getting average ping 
times of 1600ms (stddev 1416) and 3% packet loss (some ping times over 
12000ms!). I then tried -current (the open-source HAL) which was much 
better. So I backported the current HAL to 5.0 and tried again. This gave 
a fantastic performance improvement (1.2ms with 1.6ms stddev and 0% 
packet). I tried the test a few times to check it was consistent.

I understand the reasons for not pulling this up to netbsd-5 especially 
that we are at RC3 (I think: lack of testing on all platforms and 
problems with TKIP), but hopefully this will be a useful datapoint.

--
Stephen