Openmoko strives for openness

Andy Green andy at openmoko.com
Thu Mar 27 18:45:43 CET 2008


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Somebody in the thread at some point said:
| On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 12:22 PM, Andy Green <andy at openmoko.com> wrote:
|> Somebody in the thread at some point said:
|>
|>  >> 2. Actually, is there any hope of getting 3d acceleration out of the
|>  >> graphics chip, or is that too bogged down with NDA-ness?  Are we
stuck
|>  >> porting Mesa3D?
|>
|>  Chance, sure, but the NDA situation is pretty bad it turns out for the
|>  Glamo.
|
| It's a shame!  Poor (Glamo) fools are shooting themselves in the foot
| on this one.

It doesn't make much sense to me either.  I know we have not been
deficient in trying to get this policy changed.

|>  likely be 480Mbps (GTA02 is 12Mbps) DMA'd in and out, so bandwidth won't
|>  be an issue.  I really recommend this path for any non-casual hacking.
|
|  USB2 would be fast, but AFAIK it tends to suck away all your CPU.
| Something a little smarter, like firewire?

No the host controllers for 12Mbps and 480Mbps USB -- and firewire the
same -- are all set up around DMA, so bulk transport isn't so expensive
in CPU for any of them.  As the bandwidth goes up it will start to hurt
memory bandwidth and CPU in terms of the amount of descriptors flying
about but not before a good few MBytes/sec I would guess.

|>  > Promiscuous mode? I would prefer full packet injection ;) see
those wep
|>  > networks crumble.
|>
|>  Full (radiotap) injection is useful for non-evil things too, the problem
|>  with Monitor mode and the injection is the same: the closed firmware
|>  doesn't offer it at the moment, and the firmware alone handles the MAC
|>  for the current WLAN device.
|
| My own prefs aside, this one's a biggie.  If OM's looking at
| potentially changing
| chips down the road, something a lot more hackable here would be
wonderful.

Well it has AP scan, WEP and WPA which are truly the biggies, in
comparison Monitor mode and injection are a bit specialized (despite I
would love them too).  Changing is possible but it would need a proven
Linux driver and enough advantage to offset the upset of changing,
testing, etc.  I don't see being able to say about Monitor mode and
injection is enough advantage to convince most folks about that.

These annoying fullmac firmware-is-boss type devices have a lower power
requirement that can't be ignored despite it means the product is
defined by the closed firmware in them.

You know there has been a run of mails I am writing lately and the
thread is the same all over, closed stuff is making the trouble.  If the
firmware was open, we could consider to add exactly what we wanted and
then we would be nicely and willingly locked into that product, and our
improvements are available to other customers.  But the vendor isn't
quite ready to add value to their products like that.

- -Andy
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