Patrick,
I think that your coding experience makes you qualified to undertake the coding
necessary to improve the performance of b43 on the 14e4:432b device; however, I
recommend that you not attempt it as a GSoC project. The reason is that those
projects are highly visible, and what you are trying to do is very difficult.
The actual coding is likely not a problem, but knowing what to code is not
trivial. I would hate for you to fail in a way that would be so completely obvious.
As you probably know, b43 has been developed using reverse engineering (RE)
techniques. We have no knowledge of the internal workings of the chips. Since
the LP-PHY, more and more has been required by the driver. Earlier PHY models
did quite a lot in the firmware. With the N PHYs such as your device has, the
problem got even worse. and the implementation is more incomplete. For instance,
implementation of power regulation in the wireless chip has barely been touched.
At the moment, I am the only person doing any of the RE work, and I have
relatively little time to work on that. Much of the more recent development has
come from comparing MMIO dumps between wl and b43 to see what parts are missing
from b43. That requires an extremely good knowledge of the existing driver, and
that would take a long time to acquire.
The b43 project welcomes your interest, and I hope you pursue it eventually, but
I still think you should find another project for the GSoC.
Larry
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