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

[hmpfe]

Well, at least his email address is: ryder.lee at mediatek.com
For the rest, let´s ask them => http://lists.infradead.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-mediatek

[Grommish]

Keep in mind that MediaTek contributing to the Linux kernel doesn't mean they contribute to OpenWrt directly. I just mention it because of the previous links connecting MediaTek as examples both point to outside of OpenWrt.

[TopDog]

@TopDog

I would love to be able to do more than just complain about issues I see and report useful data to the dev's, but I'm not aware of a decent guide for the more technical users (but not devs) to follow to capture the information that would be useful in resolving the problems. Stuff like what system vars to capture, log-levels for the various elements, etc.
For instance: How to tell the AP is 'stuck' and what data needs to be gathered, then which process needs to be restarted?
That might even be helpful in creating a watchdog script to 'unstick' current flaky wifi.

I still think one of the keys to improving the OpenWRT WiFi implementations is to address the points I made in the quote, and to additionally define/create testing procedures.

One the best ways to get devs to address a given issue is to document it well, and importantly, give them a reproducible scenario and clear acceptance criteria for the fix.

[anon50098793]

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=91&t=300466

There may be legal implications in us contributing to or hosting it.

The HVS, pixel valves, etc are all Broadcom IP, and we have documentation that can't be released

[ryderlee1110]

Thanks Felix for bringing MT76 to people. I'd say no driver is 100% perfect, especially it supports plenty of old devices which are no longer maintained even inside MTK.

Open source and community-driven software development is becoming increasingly important to the wireless industry, so MTK folks actively join this party starting from MT7615. So, of course, the quality of newer devices are better than legacy ones. MTK also did some basic quality/performance tests for MT7915 (and future chipsets).

If someone would like to run some newer features like BPF that utilizes newer kernel, then I believe MT76 will be one of good solutions