NetBSD Driver upgrade

["David Dudley" <DavidDu%cctexas.com@localhost>]

I'm working on engineering and development of a project and need a
little advise:

1. My application is for industrial networking and control systems,
using embedded hardware (currently developing applications on a Soekris
Net5501 card, with Argonne National Labs EPICS control software).  I
picked NetBSD because it was supported on so many different hardware
platforms, and therefore seemed a better candidate for use if a
different piece of hardware was used in the future.  From the list of
products it supports, it seems probable that anything I might end up
using, NetBSD would be most likely to be able to run on.

There seems to be some concern as to whether FreeBSD, NetBSD, or Linux
is a better choice in this situation.  I discount Linux totally, because
I don't see it as being flexible enough for this application, and I can
only count on limited amounts of resources in the target system, and
Linux definitely isn't a 'small' system.  I would consider NetBSD to be
a better choice for this, but can I get some opinions on this choice?

2. Due to the sensitive nature of these systems (I'm working on the
Municipal Water Supply system right now, but the Natural Gas system is
probably the next candidate), we fall under Public Safety jurisdiction,
and have therefore been instructed to attempt to use the 4.9 Ghz public
Safety band.

Ubiquiti networks has developed the SuperRange-4 networking card that
uses that frequency band, but it is based on the AR5414 chipset, which
is not currently supported by NetBSD.

Are there any plans in the near future to upgrade the NetBSD driver to
support this chipset?  The FreeBSD driver already supports it, which is
a plus in that column, but for flexibility I can put a plus in the
NetBSD column, which equalizes the field.  If there are plans in the
works for re-importing the driver from Free, which is what was done
previously, I can still put a plus in 'Net's column, which puts Net out
in front, again.

Any opinions or suggestions?

David Dudley
City of Corpus Christi

BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:2.1
X-GWTYPE:USER
FN:David Dudley
TEL;WORK:880-3740
ORG:;MIS
TEL;PREF;FAX:880-3741
EMAIL;WORK;PREF;NGW:DavidDu%cctexas.com@localhost
N:Dudley;David
END:VCARD