[LEDE-DEV] [PATCH] Support Candela-Tech ath10k and ath9k out-of-tree driver.

[Ben Greear]

On 06/21/2016 03:15 PM, David Lang wrote:
> On Tue, 21 Jun 2016, Ben Greear wrote:
>
>> On 06/21/2016 03:04 PM, David Lang wrote:
>>> I'll point out that there is a lot of work being done on these drivers right now in terms of making significant changes to how they do buffering that in
>>> increasing network speed as well as reducing latency
>>>
>>> search the follwoing lists for [make-wifi-fast] to see the details and benchmarks
>>> make-wifi-fast at lists.bufferbloat.net, ath9k-devel at venema.h4ckr.net,linux-wireless at vger.kernel.org
>>
>> Yes, and I will pull that stuff into my tree as it becomes stable and/or as I have time.
>>
>> It seems I have little chance to ever get my ath10k patches in the upsteam kernel, so this is the
>> best I can think of for now.
>>
>> It might be best to entirely decouple my ath10k from ath9k so folks can use stock (LEDE) ath9k
>> but my ath10k.  Maybe I simply had some typo in my first attempt at this.
>>
>> I figure Felix will know better how to make this all work, so this patch should probably
>> wait for him to comment on and/or fix.
>
> One more thing that I didn't really see in the patch (but I may have skimmed over it)
>
> What is the difference/improvement between the stock driver and the Candela-Tech driver? (i.e. as someone configuring LEDE, why would I pick your driver?)
>
> David Lang
>

The main reason is that it better supports CT ath10k firmware:

http://www.candelatech.com/ath10k-10.1.php
http://www.candelatech.com/ath10k-10.4.php

See the features list down this page a bit.  It is at least mostly up to date.
If you are not using my firmware, then I am not sure my driver will give
you much benefit over stock.

Firmware (10.1) release notes here:

http://www.candelatech.com/downloads/ath10k-fw-beta/release_notes.txt

One of the nice features for me is that I can get much better 'core' dumps out of
my firmware when using this driver, so I expect I can debug firmware crashes
more thoroughly.

For folks on this list, the IBSS support and capturing more frames in monitor
mode might be a key benefit.

Thanks,
Ben

-- 
Ben Greear <greearb at candelatech.com>
Candela Technologies Inc  http://www.candelatech.com