Openmoko strives for openness
Lally Singh
lally.singh at gmail.com
Thu Mar 27 19:23:43 CET 2008
On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 1:45 PM, Andy Green <andy at openmoko.com> wrote:
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> 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.
I'm sold. One (more?) vote for a USB2 port in later generations of OM?
> 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.
Lower power is a decent counterrequirement to promiscuity and injection.
OTOH, we've got a bit of a hacker bias on this group of developers.
If OM later sees a comparable or nearly comparable device that has
those features, perhaps a poll could be run to get an idea of what
people would want?
> 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.
*sigh* It's a shame. It's too bad we can't get the openness we're
seeing out of Sun for their opensparc project :-)
... unless OM wants to go sparc anytime soon :-P
--
H. Lally Singh
Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Science
Virginia Tech
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