The SDIO patches for TI 1251 (Android wifi chipset) are finally merged into wireless-testing, so they should be a lot easier to hack on now. That means the driver should make it into 2.6.32, though at a rather experimental stage. I did fix some crashes on ifup/ifdown since last posting, but there’s always more work to do. Current todo list includes better behavior for non-polling controllers (make the irq have a top-half), tracking down a device hang on reinitialization, pushing the msm_wifi.ko module, and on and on.
But I need to spend spare cycles on ath5k in the near term. John Linville recently remarked that he was sick of seeing bug reports that say “it works fine in madwifi,” and frankly, I agree. There’s little excuse for having a sub-standard driver given that we have had two fully open HALs for almost a year. Of course, that can be laid at my feet as much as anyone’s, so my plan is to install madwifi side-by-side with ath5k and do a lot of performance testing to see where we stand. ANI is the big missing feature; it will be useful to see how madwifi performs with and without it.
In other nerdy news, yesterday I scored a copy of Kernighan and Pike’s The Practice of Programming at the local used book store for $3. I’ve read the first five chapters so far. While I’ve been at this long enough to have already learned the book’s best practices (some the hard way), I really wish it was required reading at many of the places I’ve worked. You could do away with a lot of stupid coding standards documents by instead saying “read tpop, oh and please no studly caps.”