[Replicant] Support for Tehnoetic's USB Wifi Dongle in Replicant 6.0

[Wolfgang Wiedmeyer]

Fil writes:

> Hi Kurtis,
>
>> I would personally love to see Tehnoetic's awesome addition added to
>> Replicant 6.0. My s3 phone got stolen a few weeks ago and haven't found
>> a replacement yet, so I'm sorry that I can't contribute by testing right
>> now. A ton of work has been done on Replicant 6.0 though on the i9100
>> and i9300 and it might see a beta release sooner rather than later.
> AFAIK (not sure though), Tibi is in contact with Paul K. to integrate
> his patches that made libre wifi available into the next stable release
> of Replicant. So, you should definitely ask Tibi or Paul about all this
> (or ask publicly in the forum).
>
>> So, what are the blockers to adding this feature? Does more development
>> need to be done? Or do we need some organized testing of different
>> builds? Who all is down for some alpha testing of the feature and what
>> phones do you have?
> As far as I know, no big blockers are in place. Everything works
> sufficiently (IMO) and it only needs to be merged in the official repos.
> The situation is usable, but not-so-stable on the I9100, crashes happen
> quite often, due to current consumption spikes. It should be much more
> stable on the I9300. As for testing, I seem to remember that the
> Tehnoetic Team was planning to work on the ath9k driver to try and
> resolve the power consumption issue but, again, you should ask Tibi, for
> more precise information. 

Added Tiberiu to CC. I can confirm that on Replicant 6.0, the S3 also
seems to be more stable. I only had crashes when the battery was really
low. Otherwise, the adapter simply powers down if there is not enough
battery power left and the connection is lost.
In the Replicant 6.0 kernel, I included a backport of the ath tree from
the 3.4 kernel. So it would be good to test the optimizations regarding
the power consumptions on top of the backport. I'm also wondering if
other projects already have solutions for these issues with the ath9k
driver. The wireless wiki has a page about power consumption with
ath9k[1]. mac80211 also has a dynamic power save feature that should be
enabled with ath9k[2]. Some testing could be done to see how well this
works with the smdk4412 kernel.

Best regards,
Wolfgang

> I personally did some (very limited) testing while developing the
> scripts I published on the forum, and the results are reported in my
> posts.
> I own one I9100 and I'm expecting to buy an I9300 sooner or later. So I
> put myself at disposal to do some testing on those two devices, if
> needed.
>
>> 
>> Can we use this email thread to organize the progress on this? If you
>> think that the issues, forum or wiki is a better place to have this
>> discussion, reply to this thread if move the discussion, or parts of it,
>> over to one of those.
> I guess that a forum thread would be better, allowing anybody to read
> and contribute, and making it persistent through time.
> There's the wiki too.. when we have something more comprehensive, we
> could put together an article on the libre wifi situation... again, I'm
> at disposal for this too..
>
> As for the graphical front-end, things are exactly as I stated in the
> forum. Nothing has changed. As soon as I get past the SDK limitations,
> developing the GUI won't be a problem. Any help is appreciated. 
>
> Happy Hacking to everyone,
>
> Fil
>
> _______________________________________________
> Replicant mailing list
> Replicant at lists.osuosl.org
> http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/replicant



[1]  https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/drivers/ath9k/power-consumption

[2]  https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/documentation/dynamic-power-save

-- 
Website: https://fossencdi.org
OpenPGP: 0F30 D1A0 2F73 F70A 6FEE  048E 5816 A24C 1075 7FC4
Key download: https://wiedmeyer.de/keys/ww.asc
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 818 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.osuosl.org/pipermail/replicant/attachments/20170122/f91fb8e0/attachment.asc>