Tue, 08 Apr 2008
Linux Hardware Support
Just over a year ago, Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the Linux Driver Project - companies could get Linux drivers written for their hardware free of charge, if they provided specifications (possibly under NDA). There is now an April 2008 Status Report for the project - they are short of companies and hardware to write drivers for. This is probably because Linux hardware support is excellent in all but a few specific areas - there is some interesting discussion of the efforts being made to support wireless devices and graphics cards later on in the thread. (If you're looking to get involved with Linux kernel development, cleaning up greg's LDP git tree would be a good place to start.)
Speaking of graphics drivers, VIA appears to be following Intel and ATI in releasing the necessary documentation to write good drivers for its chipsets. Suddenly the future is looking quite bright for Linux hardware support - almost all hardware will already work out of the box, and things are only improving over the next couple of years.
Posted: 08 Apr 2008 23:53 | | Comments (0)
Sun, 02 Dec 2007
Back to using Linux wireless tree
My laptop has a Broadcom 4311 rev 01 wireless chipset. The drivers from the latest Linux git releases are vastly superior to the old bcm43xx driver... so as of yesterday, I'm back to running the latest wireless-2.6 code. The former upstream maintainer claims that he gets better throughput with the reverse-engineered Linux driver than he does on Windows XP.
While I was at it, I compiled in dynamic tick (tickless) support. I then had some fun with powertop, and managed to bring CPU wakeups down to about 8 per second. It seemed that using the framebuffer console required 5 wakeups per second, but the non-framebuffer one needed around 250... this was dreadfully unscientific, though.
Posted: 02 Dec 2007 23:33 | | Comments (0)
Sun, 26 Aug 2007
BCM43xx wireless range
This weekend, I'm at the annual Debian BBQ in Cambridge, and it's very nice weather. All the cool people are sitting outside with their laptops, a good 10-20 meters from the indoor wireless access point, happily using the internet. The problem is, by default, my wireless card just doesn't work at that range.
So, today I had a look at the Broadcom bcm43xx driver code, to see what was going on. After reading a thread on the LKML bcm43xx-dev, it turns out that the current versions of this driver do not automatically adjust the bitrate. Manually setting the bitrate to a low value has got me at least double the range:
sudo iwconfig eth1 rate 1M
Of course, this isn't ideal. The same thread mentions that automatic rate adjustment will be implemented in the driver some time soon - which will be really useful.
Posted: 26 Aug 2007 17:50 | | Comments (2)
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Tim Retout tim@retout.co.uk
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