On Tue, 08 Aug 2006 17:54:17 GMT John Navas <spamfilter0@navasgroup.com> wrote:
| On Tue, 08 Aug 2006 10:00:06 -0700, Jeff Liebermann
| <jeffl@comix.santa-cruz.ca.us> wrote in
| <ondhd25dgkeknpmjg9cg8r22k6vhoharh8@4ax.com>:
|
|>phil-news-nospam@ipal.net hath wroth:
|>
|>>The hardware savings exceeded the OS licensing cost, so Cisco
|>>makes more money this way.
|>
|>I beg to differ. The only major difference between v4 and v5 hardware
|>is the size of the flash RAM and main RAM. I've compared the boards
|>in detail. All the same parts from the same vendor. My guess is
|>perhaps $0.50 hardware savings per board in large quantities. Let's
|>see... Hynix 16Mbit SDRAM chips are about $0.70/ea in 100K quantites.
|>What hardware savings?
|>
|>Last time I checked, the VxWorks DevSys is $50,000. My guess is that
|>runtime licenses are about $5 per unit in 10K piece quantity. Probably
|>considerably less in millions[1], but methinks it's still more than
|>the paltry parts cost savings. Considering that memory chip prices
|>are in decline (after last years increases), while software license
|>fees seem to be increasing, it's also a lousy long term strategy.
|>There's even allegations of price fixing in the memory market:
|>|
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1989166,00.asp
|>
|>See:
|>|
http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/pics/wireless/WRT54G/ (900K)
|>for a comparison photo. V4 on the left, V5 on the right. The
|>components have moved somewhat but they're basically the same.
|>
|>[1] Duz anyone know the large quantity VxWorks licence costs?
|
| I personally think the change probably had more to do with efficiency,
| stability and support. With all due respect to Linux advocates, it's
| not a terribly good embedded real-time OS. It was probably used in the
| first place as a matter of expediency and cheapness (and coolness), not
| suitability. VxWorks is an excellent platform. Likewise QNX (my
| personal favorite in this area).
So you think that the increase in support issues I've read about with the
version 5 was just due to the newness of VxWorks for the company, and that
in time this will work out?
Personally, I've have probably gone with NetBSD for such a thing (and yes,
I've a Linux advocate first, BSD second). I may still try to port NetBSD
over to WRT54GL some day. But I'm going to do Linux first because I am
already familiar with hack it even at the kernel level. I know nothing
about VxWorks internals, so I can't really say if it's good or bad.
I do know one issue with Linux (but not NetBSD) is that any changes made
to the internals of Linux must be included in source releases. That may
have been a motive, too. Maybe they had a new feature in mind but did
not want to release its source code.
I don't yet know how much Linksys changed the Linux guts to work for the
WRT54G. I might look at their source if I have time. But as soon as the
current project ends, I'm definitely going to be grabbing something like
OpenWRT for the WRT54GL and hack from there.
--
|---------------------------------------/----------------------------------|
| Phil Howard KA9WGN (ka9wgn.ham.org) / Do not send to the address below |
| first name lower case at ipal.net /
spamtrap-2006-08-08-1643@ipal.net |
|------------------------------------/-------------------------------------|
My wrt54g is now a wrt54gl after firmware upgrade. 
Linear Mode
