| |||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||
Atheros hires ath5k developerAtheros hires ath5k developerPosted Apr 16, 2008 17:16 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333)Parent article: Atheros hires ath5k developer
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.
(Log in to post comments)
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/
|
|
||||||||||||