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

[Tiberiu]

On 22.01.2017 20:57, Wolfgang Wiedmeyer wrote:
> 
> 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.

These are excellent news! Wolfgang and Fil, thank you for your work to
bring the support for ath9k_htc-based WiFi dongles (like the Tehnoetic
N150 and N150HGA) also on Replicant 6.0 and for making it easier to use
on both official 4.2 and development 6.0 versions of Replicant.

Such good work is very important to help users keep their freedom and
not switch to more up-to-date distros which ship with nonfree software
nor install nonfree firmware in Replicant, which defeats the purpose of
running a fully free distro in the first place.

We are in your debt for advancing software freedom in the mobile world
and we're working hard to automatize as many processes as possible in
our small shop so we can involve more in the development/bug fixing
effort of free software.

Happy hacking,
Tiberiu
--
https://tehnoetic.com