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Who wrote 2.6.33Who wrote 2.6.33Posted Feb 12, 2010 8:25 UTC (Fri) by atl (guest, #5255)Parent article: Who wrote 2.6.33
The truth of the matter is that Broadcom has several developers contributing to various drivers in the networking and SCSI subsystems; it's only in the wireless realm that the trouble starts. Not really :( Their MIPS SOC solutions for stbs are completely missing from the main kernel, which is very annoying when you are stuck with 2.6.12 "vendor" kernel and no way to move forward.
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Who wrote 2.6.33 Posted Feb 13, 2010 18:47 UTC (Sat) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link]
> Their MIPS SOC solutions for stbs are completely missing from the main kernel,
Which arch are you talking about? BCM63xx?
Broadcom stuff Posted Feb 15, 2010 10:14 UTC (Mon) by atl (guest, #5255) [Link]
Not really. I'm talking about bcm74xx. These are chipsets used in iptv, cable and satellite stbs. The kernel claims to be 2.6.12 but it really is 2.6.12 + patched in kgdb, random mips patches from 2.6.15, jffs patches from "i'dont know where" (it is different that 2.6.12 and 2.6.15), mtd patches, and basically standard crappy vendor code all over the place. Most of the files in different directories are copy and pasted with minor changes (io register definitions, etc).
ls linux-2.6.12-brcm-4.2/arch/mips/brcmstb
Kconfig brcm93563 brcm97038c0 brcm97112 brcm97312 brcm97315bbx brcm97319 brcm97328 brcm97400b0 brcm97401c0 brcm97403a0 brcm97455 common
The patch to 2.6.12 can be downloaded here:
The sad part is that all this is accompanied by 40k binary driver that only have couple of ioctl so it doesn't really need to be binary but because of this crap I can't really port their stuff to something more recent.
Atheros are just as stupid Posted Feb 15, 2010 19:18 UTC (Mon) by dion (subscriber, #2764) [Link]
Heh, funny you should mention it, due to the utter pig-headedness of Atheros I'm now stuck with Linux 2.6.15 with broken ECMP support on the ar7240 MIPS SoC.
It's absolutely incredible that Atheros and Broadcom feel that it's ok for them to profit from Linux support for their chips, yet they insist on NDAs and refusing to do anything to document their chips.
Someone with a vicious lawyer ought to educate Atheros about the GPL in a way that reminds them that a lot (most?) of their SoCs are sold to people who like to put Linux on them and proper Linux support only helps them sell more chips.
What could Atheros or Broadcom possibly hope to gain from keeping their datasheets secret?
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