Openmoko strives for openness

[Lally Singh]

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