16 Jul
2018
16 Jul
'18
2:35 p.m.
Hi Fabien,
On Thu, Jul 12, 2018 at 11:11:19AM -0400, Fabien Gagné wrote:
Mark,
Can't we add all the needed drivers to Chef's builder ?
All the WiFi (brcmfmac) and networking related drivers are included in
OpenWrt, that's not really the problem.
The problem is more that those brcm27xx SoCs don't have any fast I/O
interfaces which would allow attaching a SoftMAC WiFi radio which
uses the mac80211 framework of the Linux kernel. Most boards use
either USB or SDIO to attach WiFi modules which are then usually
self-managed FullMAC radios, hence support for specific WiFi modes
or features depends on the vendor's closed-source firmware running
on those WiFi chip's built-in controller. If there are any mesh
features they are usually not interoperable with those of other
vendors...
The few USB-connected SoftMAC chips out there (ath9k_htc, rt2800usb)
do have limitations which are undesireable for mesh environments, such
as the number of associated WiFi peers being limited 7 or even less,
with undefined behaviour in case of more peers being around.
>> Honestly, I haven't even considered
using routers. Should I ?
Yes!
For audio purposes, many router boards these days come with some
audio features or at least the option to attach an audio codec
(such as Wolfson WM8731) to it. You could either use a router
with audio inputs/outputs or use a devboard (eg. VoCore2) and
attach a codec to its i2s/pcm interface and i2c bus yourself.
Performance-wise it's just much smarter to add audio features to
a networking device than adding networking (esp. mesh!) features to
a media-playback-centric device.
Cheers
Daniel