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Date:      Mon, 13 Jul 2020 10:34:51 +0000
From:      "Bjoern A. Zeeb" <bz@FreeBSD.org>
To:        "Emmanuel Vadot" <manu@bidouilliste.com>
Cc:        driesm.michiels@gmail.com, freebsd-wireless@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Current state of recent wireless cards
Message-ID:  <778A3FF0-905B-49ED-ABDE-913C3451AB16@FreeBSD.org>
In-Reply-To: <20200710233308.b27284cd15dec5849fb5cc32@bidouilliste.com>
References:  <000501d655e3$90c40170$b24c0450$@gmail.com> <CAFC648B-1A32-4FF3-AC98-23A2B93732D5@FreeBSD.org> <20200710233308.b27284cd15dec5849fb5cc32@bidouilliste.com>

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On 10 Jul 2020, at 21:33, Emmanuel Vadot wrote:

>  That's a bit optimistic that attach and firmware loading is half of
> the work no ?
>  I don't know how much linuxkpi layer is needed for 80211 compat but I
> guess it's "a lot" ?

Part of that “lot” is that as Adrian also indicates the net80211 
parts also
need doing as otherwise you cannot write the compat on top and that 
makes
it hard to estimate how much will be compat or native yet.

Also given along with ath10k this is the “first” bits to do this in 
FreeBSD
it’ll always take longer than doing a 2nd or 3rd driver.


>  IIRC Linux have multiple 80211 framework no ?

Well kind-of layered: mac80211 / cfg80211 and the user space config
stuff in nl80211 and I’d almost thought intermangled add the entire
regdomain parts.
https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org has at least some overview there.


>  I guess your work only focus on one (used by iwlwifi), do you know 
> how
> many drivers used the same one ? What about FullMAC drivers like the
> SDIO broadcom one used in many ARM SBC, is that using the same
> framework ?

The Broadcom driver could be a great deal easier to port than it is.
It will be easier to port with this as some parts are already covered
as a result of this and more will be.  The SDIO parts for the fmac are
not part of this as the Intel work is PCI-only but those were done last
year already.  I am currently trying to get my hands-on a PCI card as
well as I hope that might speed up some things.

On another note, I was able to get the rtw88 driver compile in under a
day based on the iwlwifi.   That’s kind-of an ideal case, other 
drivers
would need more time (and it’ll highly depend on whether that is other
Linux or other WiFi bits).

I had done a comparison after the initial iwlwifi work based on compile
time errors for a few Dual BSD-GPL or ISC or similarly friendly licensed
drivers:  the order was iwlwifi < rtw88 < ath11k < ath10k < brcmfmac in
terms of individual errors and functions missing/to implement.  I also
had numbers of how much the iwlwifi work had reduced all this but they
are outdated.

I also looked at the mt7601u GPL driver (as the hope is that some of 
these
could also be ported more quickly and possibly live outside the tree but
at least be avail) and it wasn’t too bad either.  A handful of extra 
WiFi
constants and 6 or so functions and then the usual Linux noise on top.


/bz



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