7 ms·

Not too surprising given what I've seen of their vendor sdk driver source code, compared to mt76. (Messy would be kind assessment) Unfortunately, there are als

Not too surprising given what I've seen of their vendor sdk driver source code, compared to mt76. (Messy would be kind assessment) Unfortunately, there are also some running aftermarket firmware builds with the vendor driver, due to it having an edge in throughput over mt76. Mediatek and their WiSoC division luckily have a few engineers that are enthusiastic about engaging with the FOSS community, while also maintaining their own little OpenWrt fork running mt76.[1] [1] https://git01.mediatek.com/plugins/gitiles/openwrt/feeds/mtk-openwrt-feeds/ https://git01.mediatek.com/plugins/gitiles/openwrt/feeds/mtk...

molticrystal 2y ago
Is there any news releases or other information about that program, such as their goals, how much of the feed is merged upstream, etc?
dylan604 2y ago
Why is it so much of this hardware/firmware feels so much like deploying a PoC to production? Why can't they hire someone that actually knows what they are doing?
- dboreham 2y ago
  Because money
- ta988 2y ago
  Because you have to over pay all those executives and shareholders.
- fragmede 2y ago
  Hardware companies are bad at making software, and the corollary, software companies are bad at making hardware.
  - therein 2y ago
    In the middle you have Apple that is getting better at making certain kinds of hardware, worse at some hardware and definitely worse in software.
  - perching_aix 2y ago
    I feel like there's an opportunity for a joke here somewhere along the lines of hardware companies being really terrible at writing software, while software companies being just a normal amount of terrible at writing software.
    - a_dabbler 2y ago
      A few attempts with chstgpt managed it: "Hardware companies writing software is like watching a train wreck in slow motion. Software companies? They just crash at regular speed."
  - dist-epoch 2y ago
    Which is why NVIDIA is king of the world, they are good at both hardware and software.
- jdietrich 2y ago
  The consumer space is brutally competitive - you're working on tight margins and designs become obsolete very quickly. MediaTek's business is built on selling chips with the latest features at the lowest possible price. Everything has to be done at a breakneck pace that is dictated by the silicon. You start writing firmware as soon as the hardware design is finalised; it needs to be ready as soon as the chips are ready to ship. These conditions are not at all suited to good software engineering. In an ideal world, consumers would be happy to pay a premium for a device that's a generation behind in terms of features but has really good firmware. In the real world, only Apple have the kind of brand and market power to even attempt that.
  - JonChesterfield 2y ago
    Intel networking used to have the expensive and works traits. Not confident their current products would be as good.
    - phil21 2y ago
      Indeed. A friend who is more plugged into such things me told me 4-5 years ago they laid off most of the senior Intel network driver team. Basically the only edge they had. I can’t imagine things are any better these days. Inertia is a hell of a thing, but you are starting to see the cracks form. I just don’t know if there is an alternative.
    - sofixa 2y ago
      When? The Intel X710 series of network cards was released in 2014, and it wasn't until ~2018 that it became actually usable (end of 2018? I don't recall really, but when I stumbled upon it it had already been a public problem for more than a year, and it took a few more months for patches to come). I'm talking things like full OS crashes while doing absolutely nothing, no traffic whatsoever or even better, silently starting to drop all network traffic (relatively silently, just an error message in the logs, but otherwise no indication, the interface still shows up as fine and up in the OS). It was all a driver issue (although both Intel drivers didn't work, so not only) that was later fixed. After that, it was rock solid. But the fact that there was a high class network card sold for lots of money, on hardware compatibility lists at various vendors, which didn't work at all for pretty much everyone for more than a few years is disgusting.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  >Why can't they hire someone that actually knows what they are doing? Because those employees cost a lot of money and these commodity widgets have razor thin margins that don't enable them to pay high salaries while also making enough profit to stay in business. You can pay more to hire better people and put the extra cost in the price of the product but then HP, Lenovo, Dell, et-al aren't gonna buy your product anymore, they're gonna buy instead from your competition who's maybe worse but provides lower prices which is what's most important for them because the average end user of the laptop won't notice the difference between network cards but they do check the sticker price of the machine on Amazon/Walmart and make the purchasing decision on that and stuff like the CPU and GPU not on the network card in the spec sheet.
  - stavros 2y ago
    [flagged]
- layer8 2y ago
  Hardware manufacturers see software as a cost center, it’s often made as cheaply as possible. And hardware engineers aren’t necessarily good software developers. It isn’t their main expertise.

molticrystal 2y ago

Is there any news releases or other information about that program, such as their goals, how much of the feed is merged upstream, etc?

dylan604 2y ago

Why is it so much of this hardware/firmware feels so much like deploying a PoC to production? Why can't they hire someone that actually knows what they are doing?

dboreham 2y ago
Because money
ta988 2y ago
Because you have to over pay all those executives and shareholders.
fragmede 2y ago
Hardware companies are bad at making software, and the corollary, software companies are bad at making hardware.
- therein 2y ago
  In the middle you have Apple that is getting better at making certain kinds of hardware, worse at some hardware and definitely worse in software.
- perching_aix 2y ago
  I feel like there's an opportunity for a joke here somewhere along the lines of hardware companies being really terrible at writing software, while software companies being just a normal amount of terrible at writing software.
  - a_dabbler 2y ago
    A few attempts with chstgpt managed it: "Hardware companies writing software is like watching a train wreck in slow motion. Software companies? They just crash at regular speed."
- dist-epoch 2y ago
  Which is why NVIDIA is king of the world, they are good at both hardware and software.
jdietrich 2y ago
The consumer space is brutally competitive - you're working on tight margins and designs become obsolete very quickly. MediaTek's business is built on selling chips with the latest features at the lowest possible price. Everything has to be done at a breakneck pace that is dictated by the silicon. You start writing firmware as soon as the hardware design is finalised; it needs to be ready as soon as the chips are ready to ship. These conditions are not at all suited to good software engineering. In an ideal world, consumers would be happy to pay a premium for a device that's a generation behind in terms of features but has really good firmware. In the real world, only Apple have the kind of brand and market power to even attempt that.
- JonChesterfield 2y ago
  Intel networking used to have the expensive and works traits. Not confident their current products would be as good.
  - phil21 2y ago
    Indeed. A friend who is more plugged into such things me told me 4-5 years ago they laid off most of the senior Intel network driver team. Basically the only edge they had. I can’t imagine things are any better these days. Inertia is a hell of a thing, but you are starting to see the cracks form. I just don’t know if there is an alternative.
  - sofixa 2y ago
    When? The Intel X710 series of network cards was released in 2014, and it wasn't until ~2018 that it became actually usable (end of 2018? I don't recall really, but when I stumbled upon it it had already been a public problem for more than a year, and it took a few more months for patches to come). I'm talking things like full OS crashes while doing absolutely nothing, no traffic whatsoever or even better, silently starting to drop all network traffic (relatively silently, just an error message in the logs, but otherwise no indication, the interface still shows up as fine and up in the OS). It was all a driver issue (although both Intel drivers didn't work, so not only) that was later fixed. After that, it was rock solid. But the fact that there was a high class network card sold for lots of money, on hardware compatibility lists at various vendors, which didn't work at all for pretty much everyone for more than a few years is disgusting.
Rinzler89 2y ago
>Why can't they hire someone that actually knows what they are doing? Because those employees cost a lot of money and these commodity widgets have razor thin margins that don't enable them to pay high salaries while also making enough profit to stay in business. You can pay more to hire better people and put the extra cost in the price of the product but then HP, Lenovo, Dell, et-al aren't gonna buy your product anymore, they're gonna buy instead from your competition who's maybe worse but provides lower prices which is what's most important for them because the average end user of the laptop won't notice the difference between network cards but they do check the sticker price of the machine on Amazon/Walmart and make the purchasing decision on that and stuff like the CPU and GPU not on the network card in the spec sheet.
- stavros 2y ago
  [flagged]
layer8 2y ago
Hardware manufacturers see software as a cost center, it’s often made as cheaply as possible. And hardware engineers aren’t necessarily good software developers. It isn’t their main expertise.