Can open source drivers ever be as good as proprietary ones?

For Developers
15

One of the devices I have is the Nighthawk R8000, which requires a proprietary, closed-source cts.ko in order to get more than half of it's max speed. Under OpenWrt, I max out at about 500MiB/sec throughput, where-as with the official firmware (and the bastard cts.ko), I get 960MiB/Sec throughput.

Now, when exploring this, it was suggested that Tomato has this driver, but was a 3.x kernel or older. So, it was either 1) Stock firmware, 2) OpenWrt with a 50% Throughput reduction, 3) Maybe Tomato with full throughput, but a Kernel so old it wouldn't last long as an edge device exposed to the public..

It is very easy for me to say "Why can't they just steal cts.ko like Tomato did?" (or, why won't Broadcom allow us to use their hard-work for free?!?!), and it's easy to say "Well, someone should be able to do this", and it is very easy for me to say because I have no practical idea on what is actually involved..

Can open source drives ever be as good as proprietary ones? Sure.. Will they ever be? Probably not. Proprietary drivers are funded by the company who is creating it, where-as any given OpenSource project is almost always upkept by volunteers with the varied background and histories of true enthusiasts..

Someone could fund a project for it, walk the legal line, and ensure anyone connected to it has never seen or been exposed to the real source, and yes, come up with something given the funding, time involved, etc..

A KickStarter might be an idea, but when you'd really have to hope you can generate enough interest inside the period, but would you, personally, give up a large seed chunk? I would not/could not, and would just avoid the effected devices in lieu of fighting the mountain.

But, that's just me.. I don't think the original question is off-base, and it gets asked from time to time, but while it's easy to ask, it isn't so easy to do..

2 Likes
16

None of that matters if clients can't connect to the AP or some other problem with basic operation occurs. I have to pick up some ath9k devices and test them myself, but I don't have high hopes. I've read good things about mt76 written back in 2018, but even with latest snapshot using it was rather miserable. And I'm not mad, just curious.

The weirdest thing about all this is Mediatek/Qualcomm/whoever support for open source. It looks more like a PR stunt than actual support considering that their commercial drivers are ready from day one and the open source ones don't work properly years after release. I think only AMD treats amdgpu seriously and that happened very recently.

1 Like
17

Five years ago I was able to afford the real Qualcomm drivers, at $20K per year. We lost customers and could not afford it so we switched to the drivers in the Kernel, which are Qualcomm sponsored. Well we lost even more customers and now I am a one person company.

The issue was that the AP would randomly stop talking to the Client, but was still associated. The fix was to cause the AP to reset and when the Clients came back, it was normal.

A few years ago I went into my driver archive and installed the Qualcomm drivers from the last update we ever received. I am allowed to use that for maintenance and support of previous customers, but not for development.. I broke no laws because this was just for in house testing.

Well, the Kernel driver would quit talking under high load after about 3 hours. The very same kernel and hardware with the Qualcomm ran under high load for 2 days, when I quit the test because it was obvious it would go and go and go.

Qualcomm will never make the Kernel drivers perfect because you can just imagine the revenue stream they have with $20K or more per developer. Free does not pay the frills.

8 Likes
18

I am a bit wondering about your critics of Mediatek. As I have done many hotspot systems, based on openwrt using Mediatek devices, mostly MT7620A. And havent heard about ongoing problems.
There were some issues from time to time, when new driver versions appeared, but they vanished AFAIK.

19

Well, let's try the following exercise: If you ever find a vendor driver for the BCM4306 Wi-Fi adapter on an iBook G4 (PowerPC, not x86), try to use it to connect to a WPA3-encrypted network.
I assure you the open driver works just fine. :wink:

20

It's funny that you mentioned MT7620A as I'm trying to set it up as a basic repeater - Repeater stops working the minute I turn AP on it
I'm talking about things like that.

@rsalvaterra Oh yeah, I'm sure the biggest concern of every OpenWRT user is WPA3.

21

Oh, not all of them, only the ones who truly care about security. WPA3 Personal is the only PSK protocol which enables perfect forward secrecy.

22

Hi is that the one that does not work with most devices, or most routers? yeah I thought so.

23

That's sidestepping the point. @Regokog asked if an open device driver could have as many features as the manufacturer's closed driver. I'm arguing an open driver could be more featured than a closed one. I mentioned b43 as an example, as far as WPA3 is concerned, but there are others (say, rt2800{pci,usb}).
Anyway, I'll bite. Nothing stops you from having a WPA2/WPA3 mixed-mode network. Even better, create two separate networks, one for WPA2 and another for WPA3.

24

The only reason it doesn't support WPA3 is that it was manufactured 15 years ago. If it was made today, it would.
I'm glad that rt2800 supports WPA3, but, as I mentioned in my previous post for example, it doesn't support repeater mode on MT7620 chips. Who needs WPA3 if you can have the best security on the planet - a dead network.
Not to mention the repeater functionality in OpenWRT is more of a hack than a feature if you look at the way it's implemented, but that's different story, as it's poor implementation can't be blamed on hardware manufacturers.

25

isn't WPA3-SAE already broken?
https://wpa3.mathyvanhoef.com/

26

The Q&A section at the bottom of that very same page answers your question. :wink:

27

Two things:
a) using feature count as quality measure has issues
b) part of the problem with the proprietary driver development is that is typically is financed by selling chips so development tends to cease once the chips are EOLd.

As an example in Linux ath9k and ath10k have gained airtime fairness features relatively late in their life time, not clear whether proprietary drivers at that part of the cycle would have supported that or whether qualcomm would have restricted that to ath11K (as new features are a great way to sell newer chips).

That is not to say that opensource drivers are perfect and without issues, just that IMHO it is far from clear whether proprietary drivers actually excell in all quality measures.

3 Likes
28

Exactly. The perfect way for manufacturers to plausibly deny planned obsolescence.

29

I am not even trying to blame companies for operating that way. If there is no revenue generated and no other utility for the company it is simply economically irrational to keep investing and hence companies from a given size on will be steered by the bean-counters to stop investing the time & effort. It would be nice if companies at least would open up decent documentation for retired chips so that opensource developers could take over, but even that is wishful thinking since it runs counter to current economics ideas about intellectual property.

2 Likes
30

Having written several device drivers for "ancient" hardware in my youth, I can say, that this was different in the past, although the OS itself was "Closed Source". OK, not 100%, the KGB got the sources, at least :-). There were even (printed) docs, how to write device drivers, and there were detailed docs regarding the interfaces of the vendors hardware, i.g. Device Registers and Status Registers.

1 Like
31

+1; I blame this partly on the MBA-ization of all industries. Looking at everything under a predominantly revenue-focussed spotlight can lead to the observed change in behavior. From the perspective of someone living from selling new chips giving older already deployed chips a new/longer lease on life seems counter-productive...

1 Like
32

Maybe if "right to repair" legislation forced the manufacturers to release the complete specifications and development documentation for their chips… but that's probably wishful thinking.

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33

+1; rules and regulations are basically the only thing the will stop the MBA mentality in their tracks. See the concerted efforts by businesses worldwide to reduce/remove laws and regulations. IMHO a right to repair is obviously a thing that overall will be good to society (as it will allow to longer use existing resources) and hence will come into play sooner or later, even though it seems opposite to short-term interests of some important players (who will come around following it, after it becomes effective law).

3 Likes
34

What I really need from a wifi network is stability and reliability. Even speed isn't very important to me. Airtime fairness, WPA3 and all that stuff is nice, but it doesn't matter if my network can't be configured properly or an AP randomly stops responding. And in this regard it's pretty clear which drivers excel.