
Ending the anomaly: achieving low latency and airtime fairness in WiFi [pdf] - fanf2
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/atc17/atc17-hoiland-jorgensen.pdf
======
jabl
Awesome work! It's just too bad ath9k equipped routers are starting to be a
bit hard to find..

And since ath9k is the only blob-free driver, prospects for fixing other
drivers are not that bright.

Disclaimer: I'm not involved in any of this work myself, the above is my
imperfect understanding of the situation. I'm just a happy owner and user of a
ath9k router.

~~~
Maakuth
I think the possibility of fixing existing hardware in bufferbloat project was
always limited at best. What can happen, though, is that good research results
would find their way to vendors. Then, slowly, the issues would be fixed in
new firmware blobs.

edit: typo

------
mangix
Most of this is limited to the ath9k driver. ath10k is blob based and seems to
have poor quality control as well as poor maintenance judging from all the
bugs that go unanswered.

------
kayali
For the uninitiated: how long before we can expect the results of this
research to be used in mainstream products?

~~~
legulere
From the abstract: "The implementation has been accepted into the mainline
kernel distribution, making it available for deployment on billions of devices
running Linux today."

~~~
kayali
Perhaps you misunderstood my question. How long would it take for routers that
run that version of the kernel to be available?

~~~
JPLeRouzic
As mangix said, it is not a question of "having this version in router's
kernel" because it depends strictly on the kind of chip the hardware uses.
Most Wi-Fi chips use their own program which is called "a binary blob", they
do not use the Wi-Fi stack of Linux except as a wrapper around their own code,
which is not accessible in source, only in binary.

This is why for example in Ubuntu (but also in most other Linux distributions)
there are "third party codes" that are "not free".

