Oh no :(

Posted Jun 23, 2024 22:37 UTC (Sun) by flussence (guest, #85566)
In reply to: Oh no :( by mb
Parent article: Larry Finger RIP

Wasn't going to name names, but since we're here: I think Broadcom's "official" brcmfmac driver getting into mainline was a huge regression. Barely works on any hardware I've tried it on, they did the corporate bully thing of throwing it over the wall and vanishing, and overnight it wiped out the care and effort that went into b43 - because someone (I don't care to find out who) said "we don't need this any more" and punted it from the tree.

While I'm on the subject, I recently discovered Qualcomm's ath6kl is... bad. Not at all like the 5k or 9k I've used. Downloading random blobs off a third-party github repo found in a search engine, having to manually poke USB IDs to get the driver to load, and when it finally does, dmesg turns into a bright red fireworks display and there's very little in the way of 802.11 going on. A lot of people were worried that they'd ruin Atheros when they bought them out and, well, those people were right.

(I'm still careful about which hardware I buy, but I can't fix other people's laptops I'm tasked with resurrecting. I can and have plugged a realtek dongle into them as a "temporary" workaround though!)

Oh no :(

Posted Jun 23, 2024 23:34 UTC (Sun) by cytochrome (subscriber, #58718) [Link] (2 responses)

Was that an appropriate comment on an article focused on honouring the contributions of Larry Finger?

Oh no :(

Posted Jun 24, 2024 7:01 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (1 responses)

If you read it as "the moves that have happened to replace Larry's great work are regressions", then yes, it is - it's pointing out that even with manufacturer support (and hence access to private documentation and similar), Larry's work is still better, even though Larry can no longer improve it.

Oh no :(

Posted Jun 24, 2024 13:34 UTC (Mon) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

This is exactly what I meant, yes.

Oh no :(

Posted Jun 23, 2024 23:57 UTC (Sun) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> A lot of people were worried that they'd ruin Atheros when they bought them out and, well, those people were right.

As someone who had the misfortune of having to interact with Atheros in their pre-Qualcomm days... it was a difference of degree only.

Oh no :(

Posted Jun 24, 2024 10:17 UTC (Mon) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link]

I don't think this is a correct description of the open source Broadcom Wifi driver ecosystem.
There are many drivers, but they hardly have any functional overlap with each other. There are many generations of devices with literally hundreds of different possible internal combinations. Each driver supports a certain subset of these combinations.

But let's talk about Larry instead.

He was a major contributor to the whole Broadcom driver ecosystem. Not only by writing code, but also by mentoring people.
There are only a handful of people in the Open Source world who understand the hardware to some deeper detail level.
Larry was one of them.
He mentored other people to get the Broadcom Open Source code into kernel.

And I think it was a huge success. And that was only a small part of Larry's success story.