Re: ath(4) HAL in -current vs 5.0

[David Brownlee <abs%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

On Mon, 23 Mar 2009, Stephen Borrill wrote:

> 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.

        How much pain would it be to include it in 5.0 as a compiletime
        option? It would require people to compile a custom kernel, but
        it at least opens that option

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