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Date: Sat, 19 Dec 2009 15:32:14 +0000
Message-ID: <3ace41890912190732p3e049e20ob7c63d9329352cdc@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Power consumption of RTL8187 (driver)/recommendations for
	low-power USB 802.11 adapter?
From: Hin-Tak Leung <hintak.leung@gmail.com>
To: andreamrl@tiscali.it
Cc: Florian Zumbiehl <florz@florz.de>,
	Larry Finger <Larry.Finger@lwfinger.net>,
	herton@mandriva.com.br, htl10@users.sourceforge.net,
	linux-wireless@vger.kernel.org
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Sender: linux-wireless-owner@vger.kernel.org

On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 10:30 AM, Andrea Merello <andreamrl@tiscali.it> wrote:

> Hmm.. Well.. I guess that effectively a USB softmac card on a slow
> computer might produce a noticeable overhead, even if I never tried
> before..

Oh, I have an old machine with a celeron 366Mhz, where I run a zd1211
with the vendor driver as AP.... throughput to a USB disk sharing a
hub something like 430kB/s but can be over 70kB to the the local
non-USB hard disk. (some of the difference in speed is obviously just
data bandwidth contention). There are significant overhead at the USB
level, I think; but in any case, the CPU probably can't sleep because
the USB sub-system is always doing something, if even just for
processing beacons.