Re: [ath5k-devel] [ath9k-devel] Request for help: gui toolkit creation for atheros PHY/MAC statistics
On 03/23/2012 10:07 AM, Adrian Chadd wrote:
Hi all,
I'd like some help in writing a GUI toolkit for recording, playing
back and visualising some of the PHY/MAC statistics the Atheros NICs
expose.
What I can do: help with the MAC/PHY side of things, identify what
initial things would be good to support and what would actually be
useful.
What I can't do: dedicate time to write a GUI. :-)
What I'd like to see: something completely free/open source written so
we can improve the foss wireless development process.
(Why I'm doing this: I'm fed up staring at printf() debugging in
ath9k/FreeBSD and it's hard to have others visualise what's going on
..)
I'd like it to be in C++/QT (before you ask - if you can make python
or ${OTHER_LANG} handle the sheer rates of wifi traffic, MAC counters
and PHY errors, _live_, and on tablet/atom class hardware, then please
by all means do so..) and I'd like it to be platform portable. That
way it can be used as a visualisation tool on other platforms, even if
it's unable to do live capture itself (think MacOSX/Windows.)
I wouldn't ask someone to do it and then tell them what language. Just suggest
to them what it needs to do instead.
The big question for me is: How do you propose to get the info out
of the driver and up to user-space?
Just in case it matters...while benchmarking my Linux ethtool patch to ath9k,
I found it took around 35us to make the ethtool ioctl call to get the
stats. This was on a dual-core Atom system.
Thanks,
Ben
--
Ben Greear gree...@candelatech.com
Candela Technologies Inc http://www.candelatech.com
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Re: [ath5k-devel] [ath9k-devel] Request for help: gui toolkit creation for atheros PHY/MAC statistics
On 23 March 2012 10:18, Ben Greear gree...@candelatech.com wrote: I wouldn't ask someone to do it and then tell them what language. Just suggest to them what it needs to do instead. I'm sorry if it came across as demanding. It's more that I've looked at how/where people tend to use these kinds of visualisation tools and they're not on quad-core i7 laptops. They're on little itty atom netbooks (or tablets these days, I guess) with comparitively limited CPU. I've also had people suggest C#. Which is fine, but as I'd like this to be totally open source, I don't want it to depend upon any closed source C# libraries or any microsoft only runtime bits. Same holds for any other language. The other thing is keeping multiple threads going so your UI doesn't become unresponsive when you're falling behind doing network/disk IO or math operations. Yes, I've written some GUI stuff, so I have a basic idea of what's going on. If someone wants to me prove me wrong by demonstrating it done in python or some other scripting language then fine. The big question for me is: How do you propose to get the info out of the driver and up to user-space? I'll worry about that later. For FreeBSD, the PHY errors come out via radiotap, so it'll look like a BPF stream. Just in case it matters...while benchmarking my Linux ethtool patch to ath9k, I found it took around 35us to make the ethtool ioctl call to get the stats. This was on a dual-core Atom system. Right, but you can fetch a whole lot of statistics each call. The ath/HAL ioctl API doesn't return a single stat on each invocation. It returns a whole swath of them. I'm not worried about extracting the data from the various flavours of wifi stacks we're working with in BSD/Linux. :-) Adrian ___ ath5k-devel mailing list ath5k-devel@lists.ath5k.org https://lists.ath5k.org/mailman/listinfo/ath5k-devel
