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Comment by gcp | Hacker News Reader

The experience was the same if you were a big customer (we sold 8M+ units). I mean, the process you describe sucks just as much if you're an engineer at a big customer. Tons of effort to get even the slightest piece of documentation.

Presumably the experience at management level (i.e. the price - you get what you pay for) made up for it, or they wouldn't sell anything. (Admittedly, if the drivers just work then documentation is less important, too. Compare to other fields like the state of Linux GPU drivers. I wouldn't say Broadcom drivers are without problems, though :-)

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I had the same experience with high volumes.

However, I think a lot of issues was due to documentation not being written at all (or being in very bad shape).

This is like the tenth time I've heard this since I started paying attention. So my question is how are they selling anything? What's so special about their chips that you can't get the same or better at a handful of other places. Like why did RPi go with BCM at all and nor say STM or someone else.

The inconveniences we're describing are limited to the suckers that get to write the firmware/drivers for these things, i.e. a few engineers.

Price, performance, availability, driver quality, etc may look competitive to the competition and affect a few million users.

If you sell a few million of these, saving 5 cents on the Wifi chip pays at least for 2 engineers full-time to deal with whatever issues Broadcom gives you.

Still, why aren't there good drivers ? or why isn't a way for affordably buying/sharing drivers for such chips , as a way to solve that problem ?

If you've chosen a cheaper chip and paid an engineer to work through the crappy documentation to write a driver, why would you give this away? It just helps your competition.

It may still make sense if the maintenance burden is high and upstreaming has benefits, but that's not always the case.

OK. So what about a third party developing and selling drivers ?

Because in my experience, hardware companies don't know how to write good software.

In my case, the problem went beyond that. They put in patch that made the BLE transmit out of spec. Plus their lack of support added at least 3 months to our launch dates. We had everything in place but couldn't launch because of Wifi RF issues that was not documented. Long story short, overall the savings was not worth it. It cost us more in R&D, NRE as compared to BOM.

RPi went with BCM because it was founded by ex-Broadcom employees. There is no other good reason to use a Broadcom chip, especially in an "open" platform, because BCM chips by definition are not "open".

The BCM283x series has a good mix of features, but it is far from being the only solution for set-top boxes.

Because 802.11 is HARD. The number of companies that build full-featured and modern chips is small, and the barriers to entry are high.

For example, if you want a full-featured chip for building an AP, there's maybe three companies capable of giving you one - Atheros, BCM, and Marvell. And that last only sells to Cisco. So you're stuck between two companies with drivers that are awful in slightly different ways, and only a year into working with one or the other do you discover the firmware bugs.

If you want previous-generation-equivalent chips there are more suppliers available, and some of them probably have decent drivers, but they're uncommon in developed-country markets.

From someone who spent last night remotely (internationally, and without an ethernet connection available) troubleshooting my partner's laptop's latest Ubuntu v. Broadcom driver troubles, "just works" isn't the wording that comes to mind.

To be fair those were likely the reverse engineered open source drivers.

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