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Atheros hires ath5k developer
| From: | "Luis R. Rodriguez" <lrodriguez-DlyHzToyqoxBDgjK7y7TUQ-AT-public.gmane.org> | |
| To: | <ath5k-devel-xDcbHBWguxEUs3QNXV6qNA-AT-public.gmane.org>, Linux Wireless <linux-wireless-u79uwXL29TY76Z2rM5mHXA-AT-public.gmane.org> | |
| Subject: | Atheros kernel support, joining the company | |
| Date: | Tue, 15 Apr 2008 19:18:06 -0700 | |
| Message-ID: | <480561DE.7020205@atheros.com> | |
| Archive-link: | Article, Thread |
Fellow ath5k hackers, Good news. I write to you to inform you that I have decided to join Atheros as a full time employee, as a Software Engineer, to help them with their goals and mission to get every device of Atheros supported upstream in the Linux kernel. I realize there are a lot of challenges ahead but I am well aware of the how the community works and the benefits of working with it and am confident we will find ways to strengthen the relationship between Atheros and the community. I also realize there are a lot of pending questions and perhaps even more now. Please rest assured we are doing what we can to work together as soon as possible. I will keep maintaining compat-wireless and prism54 but I didn't get to finish the Marvell TopDog driver port from net80211 to mac80211. Hope someone is willing to take that over as I will be pretty busy with other work now. git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/mcgrof/mrvl_cb82.git I do plan on keeping on pushing the Central Regulatory Domain Agent work I had started. The db schema and a port of ar5k regulatory information to it can now be found here: http://winlab.rutgers.edu/~mcgrof/crda/ In the coming weeks I hope to finish the integration now that a db is available and hope to also update the db with more up to date values. Luis _______________________________________________ ath5k-devel mailing list ath5k-devel-xDcbHBWguxEUs3QNXV6qNA@public.gmane.org https://lists.ath5k.org/mailman/listinfo/ath5k-devel
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Atheros hires ath5k developer
Posted Apr 16, 2008 17:10 UTC (Wed) by mcgrof (subscriber, #25917) [Link]
Certainly not an April 1st joke :)
April 1
Posted Apr 16, 2008 18:22 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]
Sorry for the hedging there - for some reason, something about the message set off my hoax alarms, to the point that I held it for a while to see what followups came. I've removed the "April 1" reference from the blurb.
Atheros hires ath5k developer
Posted Apr 17, 2008 3:05 UTC (Thu) by ikm (subscriber, #493) [Link]
My thoughts as well
Atheros hires ath5k developer
Posted Apr 16, 2008 17:16 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Wow. Go Atheros! With them joining the ranks of companies like Ralink or Intel (sorry those are the ones that I use, if there are others with good open drivers I want to know about it!) for providing good open source drivers for Linux this is a very cool thing. And special thanks for OBSD for providing the open source 'HAL' for Atheros. Now this along with open source video driver support from Intel, AMD, and Via (hopefully..) then things are looking up for these two traditionally sore spots on with open source drivers. Amazing.
Atheros hires ath5k developer
Posted Apr 16, 2008 17:26 UTC (Wed) by BenHutchings (subscriber, #37955) [Link]
Ralink did release source for their Linux drivers, but that showed just how buggy they were. The drivers that have made it into Linux upstream have been reimplemented by others.
Atheros hires ath5k developer
Posted Apr 16, 2008 17:41 UTC (Wed) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]
If a company releases even a buggy driver, it still helps, because it provides information that the reimplementers need to know.Ideally, of course, a good driver would be produced by effective two-way feedback between the experts on the hardware, and Linux kernel experts. One way is to get the company producing the product to hire an experienced Linux kernel developer to bridge the gaps, so good for Atheros.
Atheros hires ath5k developer
Posted Apr 16, 2008 19:05 UTC (Wed) by nowster (subscriber, #67) [Link]
Hopefully Luis will be allowed to release his efforts in a form that can be incorporated into the stock kernel source. At the moment the semi-free madwifi is more reliable than ath5k with 2.6.25-rc kernels[*], due (I suspect) to problems with the mac80211 layer being rather too aggressive in reducing the link speed in face of less than ideal signal conditions. Signal quality/level monitoring (using wavemon) suggests that unsmoothed values are causing the rate algorithms to believe that conditions are worse than they actually are. I see similar problems with the in-kernel rt2500 driver. [*] Incidentally, the 2.6.25-rc8 ath5k driver doesn't install, due to symbol mismatches. compat-wireless does work.
Atheros hires ath5k developer
Posted Apr 16, 2008 19:57 UTC (Wed) by k3ninho (subscriber, #50375) [Link]
Ah. An explanation for my rt2500pci mac80211-based driver falling back to low speeds and requiring a 'iwconfig' at the command to get the device back to full speed. Thank you!
Atheros hires ath5k developer
Posted Apr 16, 2008 21:54 UTC (Wed) by nowster (subscriber, #67) [Link]
It appears to be tweakable via debugfs. Linux Wireless Wiki
Atheros hires ath5k developer
Posted Apr 16, 2008 20:43 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> Hopefully Luis will be allowed to release his efforts in a form that can be incorporated into the stock kernel source. That's what the man said in the article, that Atheros is trying to get driver support into the vanilla kernel.
Atheros hires ath5k developer
Posted Apr 17, 2008 0:59 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]
Intel are NOT that great, their wireless drivers still require binary-blob non-free firmware. At least their binary blob doesn't run on the host system any more, but fixing this issue isn't something we will see without any reverse engineering by people outside of Intel: http://bughost.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=1594 I'd dearly like to see something like ath5k's OpenHAL or prism54's FreeMAC for Intel wireless cards, but I wouldn't have the foggiest idea about were to find information about the hardware.
Atheros hires ath5k developer
Posted Apr 17, 2008 1:46 UTC (Thu) by BenHutchings (subscriber, #37955) [Link]
"Intel are NOT that great, their wireless drivers still require binary-blob non-free firmware." So far as I know, all wireless Ethernet controllers require firmware. Some of them load it from flash, but since no-one expects to boot over wireless Ethernet, that's an unnecessary expense. The last controller I know of that booted from flash was the Ralink RT2560, which has been superceded. I don't whether the firmware fundamentally has to be non-free. Radio regulations in some countries might require that. Even so, it will tend to be so interdependent with the hardware as to be practically unalterable by outsiders.
Atheros hires ath5k developer
Posted Apr 17, 2008 5:59 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]
Isn't Atheros HAL/OpenHAL something that runs on the host CPU? The folks at prism54.org are developing FreeMAC, free (GPLed with source code) firmware for Conexant wireless chips. Seems they have it easy though, since the Prism54 wireless cards have an ARM CPU on them. So, as long as wireless devices don't require firmware images to be signed before running them (like bitfrost), we'll likely be able to try to write free firmware - and violate the regulations :) Anyways, I don't see how one firmware image can know which country it is in and which regulations to comply with, nor if the user has a special licence to do software radio/hamradio or the like. Even a kernel driver probably wouldn't be able to know that without some kind of configuration info passed to it.
Atheros hires ath5k developer
Posted Apr 17, 2008 6:22 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]
Found this link after googling for the crda thing: http://lwn.net/Articles/271037/
Broadcom
Posted Apr 16, 2008 18:29 UTC (Wed) by elanthis (subscriber, #6227) [Link]
O Broadcom, where art thou?
Broadcom
Posted Apr 16, 2008 18:42 UTC (Wed) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link]
> O Broadcom, where art thou? Yeah, come on. I also need a job. :P
Broadcom
Posted Apr 17, 2008 15:47 UTC (Thu) by mjdcl (guest, #51254) [Link]
In my personal view, broadcom provide a more stable driver than atheros, I got atheros src code, there even has a bug on Makefile... it can't work on my board, reset always.
Broadcom
Posted Apr 17, 2008 16:26 UTC (Thu) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link]
> In my personal view, broadcom provide a more stable driver than atheros, Am I missing something? Where does broadcom provide _any_ driver? (aside from binary MIPS drivers and such stuff for embedded devices).
Atheros hires ath5k developer
Posted Apr 16, 2008 22:20 UTC (Wed) by okeydoke (guest, #46751) [Link]
The OpenBSD Atheros driver could use some work too. It doesn't support 802.11g or WPA.
Atheros hires ath5k developer
Posted Apr 17, 2008 5:09 UTC (Thu) by muwlgr (guest, #35359) [Link]
You mean, like "Creative hires Daniel_K to stop him hurting their business strategy" ? :>
Atheros hires ath5k developer
Posted Apr 17, 2008 5:49 UTC (Thu) by MisterIO (subscriber, #36192) [Link]
So, does that mean that reverse engineering is even more useful than what was supposed to be?
Atheros hires ath5k developer
Posted Apr 17, 2008 7:07 UTC (Thu) by johoho (subscriber, #2773) [Link]
it was never a secret that showing a company of how good you understand their own products puts you in a good hiring position.
Atheros hires ath5k developer
Posted Apr 22, 2008 14:04 UTC (Tue) by MisterIO (subscriber, #36192) [Link]
I wasn't talking about that.
I wonder if it is market pressure
Posted Apr 18, 2008 7:47 UTC (Fri) by tarjei (subscriber, #29357) [Link]
This is good news. What I am wondering about, is if this is happening because Atheros is losing business to Intel on a scale that makes it worthwhile to hire a developer. One developer may cost somewhere around $200 000. You do not have to loose a lot of sales before that becomes the cheapest option. With big OEMs like Dell and IBM focusing a lot more on Linux support on desktop machines than they used to combined with Intel providing a very good alternative we might be seeing a turning point when it comes to support for wireless cards.
I wonder if it is market pressure
Posted Apr 18, 2008 12:29 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> What I am wondering about, is if this is happening because Atheros is losing business to Intel on a scale that makes it worthwhile to hire a developer. I know that with my EEE I ended up with a Atheros wifi. It wasn't even supported under Madwifi, Xandros used these special 'swan' drivers I haven't heard of before. So I know that lots of Linux people were upset about that and it required the use of ndiswrapper for a while till Atheros released a special patch specifically to allow Madwifi driverrs to work. I told other people before the EEE came out that I was dissapointed that Asus choose Atheros over Ralink or Intel, of course they all thought Madwifi was cool... until after the EEE came out the Madwifi folks were completely powerless to support the hardware until that HAL hack was released by Atheros. Keep in mind that a angy customer making a support call is enough for Asus to loose profitability on that EEE sale... So they defenately were paying attention and it was a big enough issue that they (Atheros) had to do a abnormal release. I expect that other manufacturers were paying close attention to the EEE and they would of noticed the problems with having to support a single-kernel-specific proprietary module and the problems it caused OEMs and customers. Where as if they used Intel (or a handful of other manufacturer's cards) then it would of been a complete non-issue. I expect that this has caused Atheros to loose out on a couple big potential customers.
I wonder if it is market pressure
Posted Apr 18, 2008 16:11 UTC (Fri) by ofeeley (subscriber, #36105) [Link]
I know that when I read your posts about it I decided to hold off on getting one. I purchased another machine instead (which has an intel3945 wireless chipset and as a result works wonderfully with Fedora 8 and Fedora 9 Preview's version of NetworkManager.) I think a lot of other people that are interested in using GNU/Linux are at the stage where they realize that it's easier to buy hardware that's supportable by the community AND that hardware actually exists -- mainly from Intel.
I wonder if it is market pressure
Posted Apr 19, 2008 15:30 UTC (Sat) by muwlgr (guest, #35359) [Link]
ASUS Z99 is a great serie. They are all-Intel models (chipset, video, wireless), they are light, and they are sold without Windows. ASUS definitely has to compete with itself.
I wonder if it is market pressure
Posted May 17, 2008 11:07 UTC (Sat) by muwlgr (guest, #35359) [Link]
S*it, how wrong I was. Asus Z99Le uses A8LE motherboard with Atheros 5006EG (or 5007EG?) card : PCI ven:dev 168c:001c, subsystem 1a3b:1026 . Never ever buy it in your life. There will be neither working madwifi/ath5k driver, nor anything working opensource from Atheros. Trust me :>
Atheros hires ath5k developer
Posted May 21, 2008 20:52 UTC (Wed) by opheriper (guest, #52186) [Link]
congratulations, Luis! I've got a job offer from Ahteros too, and another offer from Cisco, both are ASIC design position. Now I'm confusing which company I should join, could you guys give me some advice, thanks very much!