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



On Mon, 23 Mar 2009, David Brownlee wrote:
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

Switching between HALs is/was pretty painful. I did this for 4.0 with the old HAL and ending up duplicating most things and renaming ath to atheee. However the structure is much cleaner with the new layout, so it might be much easier now. However, you'll probably still end up battling paths in conf/files and such like.

--
Stephen



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