Re: Specifing rate control algorithm?

[Jeff Garzik <jeff@garzik.org>]

Andy Green wrote:
> Sexy-sounding "hw offloading" is a very different thing to migrating off
> open code and putting it in vendor-specific closed source firmware.  The
> firmware is just code like any other, for an embedded ARM7 or similar,
> except that it is customized for a specific vendor hardware
> implementation and you will never see the sources.  What I understand is
> being talked about (maybe unlike the scan stuff this actually is in
> hardware, but I doubt it) is ignoring code in the stack and instead
> implementing pretty much the same code privately, to compile to a binary
> blob you can't see source for or even reverse according to its license.
>  That is a lot less romantic than mysterious hardware just waiting to be
> used.

OTOH, this is all vague, paranoid hand-waving since I'm guessing you 
don't know the internals of the Intel hardware.

We'll see what happens when Intel posts code to specify a different rate 
control algorithm.

	Jeff