[OpenWrt-Devel] [PATCH] kernel: ath10k-ct: provide a build variant for small RAM devices

[Alberto Bursi]

On 16/12/19 21:04, Christian Lamparter wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> On Mon, Dec 16, 2019 at 12:27 PM Alberto Bursi
> <bobafetthotmail at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 15/12/19 14:09, Christian Lamparter wrote:
>>>
>>> But it seems that Ben had a change of heart in this regard. I don't know the
>>> details or why, But it makes sense because it would enable his company to save
>>> some money for the systems his company sells:
>>>    <https://www.candelatech.com/lf_systems.php> so there is some value
>>> in supporting these devices, especially if someone else does all the work
>>> for it.
>>
>> These are wifi/network testing equipment, not network devices.
>>
>> Also I don't see the value in "saving some money" by using a bit less RAM
>>
>> when the cheaper system is sold for 3k, and most stuff is above 10k.
>>
>> You could use standard whitebox x86 stuff at that price point.
> 
> I'm glad this is getting some attention and others are chiming in. But
> let me tell
> you first, that I'm not an opponent of the "American way", I'm trying
> to make sense
> of it though and also what would happen to the ath10k GPIO patches that got
> quietly dropped from your reply there...
I was just commenting about the fact that they clearly don't care about 
RAM consumption for their own hardware, I found it strange that you 
pulled that up as a "potential way to save money".

Saving 10-20$ (RAM prices) on a low-volume high-price item costing 
thousands of dollars is mostly irrelevant.

> 
> As for the "These are wifi/network testing equipment, not network devices."
> True and If you are interested you can buy cheaper devices like
> <https://www.candelatech.com/ct314_product.php> from the company as well:
> 

When I said "expensive devices" I was talking of their devices that 
could mount a ath10k-supported card. A Raspi really does not.

> 
> I know these have not much to do with the issue at hand ("low-memory system"
> support in ath10k(-ct) with OpenWrt). But as Ben explained in the follow-up that
> he has a keen interest for supporting the ath10k-ct driver+firmware
> and he's doing
> a great job with the ath10k-ct issue tracker.
> 

I fully agree with merging and possibly upstreaming the current patches 
about a build option to reduce buffer sizes so that this thing does not 
OOM on devices that OpenWrt supports.

My remarks about RAM usage being irrelevant was specifc to their own 
usecase in their "expensive test equipment".

-Alberto

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