{"id":100,"date":"2010-06-03T13:42:27","date_gmt":"2010-06-03T21:42:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/digitalvampire.org\/blog\/?p=100"},"modified":"2017-07-19T23:54:53","modified_gmt":"2017-07-20T07:54:53","slug":"was-it-something-i-said","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/digitalvampire.org\/blog\/index.php\/2010\/06\/03\/was-it-something-i-said\/","title":{"rendered":"Was it something I said?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I saw that OpenBSD 4.7<\/a> was released a couple of weeks ago.\u00a0 I tried to help, I really did.<\/p>\n

I used to have a fanless 600MHz VIA system with a cheapie Airlink 101 Wi-Fi card that I used as a home wireless router.\u00a0 I ran OpenBSD on it for a few reasons — at the time I started, the OpenBSD wireless stack was ahead of Linux; their security obsession appealed to me; and not using Linux everywhere<\/em> seemed like a fun thing to do.\u00a0 It all worked pretty well, except that the wireless interface sometimes got stuck while forwarding heavy traffic.\u00a0 For quite a while, I survived with hacks similar to this nutty crontab entry<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Eventually, though, I said to myself, “Self, you’re a kernel hacker.\u00a0 You should be able to fix this driver.”\u00a0 And indeed, after a couple of evenings of hacking, I figured out what was wrong and came up with a patch<\/a> that improved things immensely for me.\u00a0 The problem was that the driver was not written with a system as slow as mine in mind, and it got confused if more than one interrupt happened before it got a chance to service the first interrupt — you can read the patch description for full details.\u00a0 Of course, being a good free software citizen, I sent my patch to the OpenBSD mailing lists so that it could be applied upstream.<\/p>\n

Here’s where things went wrong.\u00a0 I never heard from the author of this driver — I got no reply when I reported the original bug, and no replies to any mail I sent about my patch.\u00a0 I did get several reports from other users who had the same problem and found that my patch fixed things for them as well, and finally another OpenBSD committer wrote, “Then if no one objects I’ll commit it tomorrow.<\/a>”\u00a0 Unfortunately, at this point the original driver author did seem to get interested — he sent private email to this committer (not copying the mailing list or me) objecting, and so we ended up with, “Objections were made. Apparently this patch only works for AP and does funky stuff to the hardware. So back to the drawing board on this one.<\/a>”\u00a0 As I said, all of my attempts to work directly with the driver author to find out what those objections were or how to improve the patch were ignored.<\/p>\n

At this point I gave up on getting my patch upstream (and when I upgraded my wireless to 802.11n, I chose a MIPS box running OpenWrt).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I saw that OpenBSD 4.7 was released a couple of weeks ago.\u00a0 I tried to help, I really did. I used to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hacking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalvampire.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalvampire.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalvampire.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalvampire.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalvampire.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/digitalvampire.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":628,"href":"https:\/\/digitalvampire.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100\/revisions\/628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalvampire.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalvampire.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalvampire.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}