From owner-freebsd-wireless@FreeBSD.ORG Fri Mar 23 17:18:40 2012 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-wireless@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E6FAE106566B; Fri, 23 Mar 2012 17:18:40 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from greearb@candelatech.com) Received: from ns3.lanforge.com (mail.candelatech.com [208.74.158.172]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id BF32B8FC14; Fri, 23 Mar 2012 17:18:40 +0000 (UTC) Received: from [192.168.100.111] (firewall.candelatech.com [70.89.124.249]) (authenticated bits=0) by ns3.lanforge.com (8.14.2/8.14.2) with ESMTP id q2NHIYc2008650 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA bits=256 verify=NO); Fri, 23 Mar 2012 10:18:34 -0700 Message-ID: <4F6CB06A.6030102@candelatech.com> Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2012 10:18:34 -0700 From: Ben Greear Organization: Candela Technologies User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:10.0.1) Gecko/20120209 Thunderbird/10.0.1 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Adrian Chadd References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: freebsd-wireless@freebsd.org, ath9k-devel , ath5k-devel@venema.h4ckr.net Subject: Re: [ath9k-devel] Request for help: gui toolkit creation for atheros PHY/MAC statistics X-BeenThere: freebsd-wireless@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: "Discussions of 802.11 stack, tools device driver development." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2012 17:18:41 -0000 On 03/23/2012 10:07 AM, Adrian Chadd wrote: > Hi all, > > I'd like some help in writing a GUI toolkit for recording, playing > back and visualising some of the PHY/MAC statistics the Atheros NICs > expose. > > What I can do: help with the MAC/PHY side of things, identify what > initial things would be good to support and what would actually be > useful. > What I can't do: dedicate time to write a GUI. :-) > What I'd like to see: something completely free/open source written so > we can improve the foss wireless development process. > (Why I'm doing this: I'm fed up staring at printf() debugging in > ath9k/FreeBSD and it's hard to have others visualise what's going on > ..) > > I'd like it to be in C++/QT (before you ask - if you can make python > or ${OTHER_LANG} handle the sheer rates of wifi traffic, MAC counters > and PHY errors, _live_, and on tablet/atom class hardware, then please > by all means do so..) and I'd like it to be platform portable. That > way it can be used as a visualisation tool on other platforms, even if > it's unable to do live capture itself (think MacOSX/Windows.) I wouldn't ask someone to do it and then tell them what language. Just suggest to them what it needs to do instead. The big question for me is: How do you propose to get the info out of the driver and up to user-space? Just in case it matters...while benchmarking my Linux ethtool patch to ath9k, I found it took around 35us to make the ethtool ioctl call to get the stats. This was on a dual-core Atom system. Thanks, Ben -- Ben Greear Candela Technologies Inc http://www.candelatech.com