Broadcom joins the Linux Foundation

[Posted January 7, 2011 by jake]

Linux Foundation Announces Broadcom as New Member

Global communications leader Broadcom Corporation follows its move to open
source 802.11 chipset drivers with increased open development

SAN FRANCISCO, January 10, 2011 — The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit
organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced
that Broadcom Corporation is its newest member.

In September, Broadcom® announced it had open sourced its drivers for
selected Wi-Fi chipsets, a pivotal move that garnered applause throughout
the Linux community. Since then, the driver has been integrated into the
latest Linux kernel release 2.6.37 and, as a result, is actively being
improved upon by the entire Linux community. Given its portfolio of
semiconductors for wired and wireless communications, Broadcom is an
important addition to The Linux Foundation.

Broadcom is looking to extend its open development and collaboration with
the Linux community by joining The Linux Foundation and continuing its work
with the Linux Driver Project. It plans to participate in The Linux
Foundation Collaboration Summit, where it can work directly with community
developers, as well as other industry players and suppliers.

"There is no question: Linux has become a major platform for communications
devices and technologies," said Michael Hurlston, Senior Vice President &
General Manager, Broadcom's WLAN line of business. "Our decision to open
source the drivers for Broadcom's 802.11 chipsets is in response to our
growing base of customers using Linux and is the first of what we expect to
be many open development success stories."

"Broadcom understands what almost every major technology company today
knows — that collaborative, open development results in benefits that
include everything from supported hardware to reduced development costs,"
said Amanda McPherson, vice president of marketing and developer programs
at The Linux Foundation. "We applaud Broadcom for its recent move to work
more closely with the Linux community; their membership in the Linux
Foundation speaks volumes of their commitment."

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the
growth of Linux. Founded in 2007, the organization sponsors the work of
Linux creator Linus Torvalds and promotes, protects and advances the Linux
operating system by marshaling the resources of its members and the open
source development community. The Linux Foundation provides a neutral forum
for collaboration and education by hosting technical events, including
LinuxCon, and generating original Linux research and content that advances
the understanding of the Linux platform. Its web properties, including
Linux.com, reach approximately two million people per month. The
organization also provides extensive Linux training opportunities that
feature the Linux kernel community's leading experts as instructors. Follow
The Linux Foundation on Twitter.

###

Trademarks: The Linux Foundation, Linux Standard Base, MeeGo and Yocto
Project are trademarks of The Linux Foundation. Linux is a trademark of
Linus Torvalds. Broadcom® and the pulse logo are among the trademarks
of Broadcom Corporation and/or its affiliates in the United States, certain
other countries and/or the EU.

to post comments

Broadcom joins the Linux Foundation

Posted Jan 7, 2011 6:09 UTC (Fri) by csamuel (✭ supporter ✭, #2624) [Link] (3 responses)

Broadcom:

# In September, Broadcom® announced it had open sourced
# its drivers for selected Wi-Fi chipsets, a pivotal move
# that garnered applause throughout the Linux community.

vs.

http://lwn.net/Articles/405375/

# Nevertheless, everyone I know that has reviewed the
# newly released driver code is being treated for eye
# cancer.

Ain't PR great! :-)

Broadcom joins the Linux Foundation

Posted Jan 7, 2011 6:52 UTC (Fri) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (2 responses)

Better late than never. The driver will get chemo from Linux developers and all will be well. A very big category of devices now works out of the box (e.g. a lot of Dell laptops), which is good news for sure.

Broadcom joins the Linux Foundation

Posted Jan 7, 2011 7:17 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (1 responses)

Yep. Used to be if it was wireless and it was labelled 'broadcom' the best thing to do with it for Linux was to toss it into the bin.

The unfortunate part was that these were among the most popular wireless devices on the planet for consumers which helped contribute massively to Linux being incompatible with many people's laptops.

This is terrific progress and shows how things can be worked out.

Broadcom joins the Linux Foundation

Posted Jan 7, 2011 15:57 UTC (Fri) by clump (subscriber, #27801) [Link]

Well said.

Broadcom joins the Linux Foundation

Posted Jan 7, 2011 8:28 UTC (Fri) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (5 responses)

I wonder about the firmware for these things. Atheros already released GPL firmware source code for one of their chips, will Broadcom be next?

http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/ar9170.fw

Broadcom joins the Linux Foundation

Posted Jan 7, 2011 13:50 UTC (Fri) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402) [Link] (2 responses)

Going slightly off topic,

I'm very impressed by Atheros's recent attitude towards the Free software community. However, with the recent purchase of Atheros by Qualcomm, I have to worry whether Qualcomm's slightly less enlightened culture will spread back to Atheros.

Optimistically there is also a possibility that Atheros's attitude will spread to Qualcomm. There ought to be a good few well respected execs in Atheros's ranks now that can testify there's nothing to fear from openness.

Broadcom joins the Linux Foundation

Posted Jan 7, 2011 20:44 UTC (Fri) by daniel (guest, #3181) [Link]

"There is also a possibility that Atheros's attitude will spread to Qualcomm"

One can hope but it is more traditional for acquirer to have its way with acquiree, which more often than not involves a triumph of darkness over light. See Oracle vs Sun.

Atheros is not that OS-friendly

Posted Jan 13, 2011 14:22 UTC (Thu) by dion (guest, #2764) [Link]

While Atheros does play nice with some of the wifi-only chips it makes, there is a whole heap of nice, but undocumented chips in its catalog.

Specifically Atheros makes highly integrated SoCs with built in CPU, wifi and switch that are completely impossible to use without signing an NDA and buying several thousand units.

There are many products that use Atheros chips where the manufacturer has signed NDAs with Atheros that forbids them from properly documenting the products, thus rendering the product useless from an OS point of view.

Broadcom joins the Linux Foundation

Posted Jan 7, 2011 14:13 UTC (Fri) by johill (subscriber, #25196) [Link] (1 responses)

Well, that's only one (ar9170) of Atheros's two (or more, if you count older ones) USB chips, the others are still closed. Their PCI-E chips (ath5k, ath9k) do not use firmware, and their SDIO chip (ath6k) doesn't have open firmware.

The Broadcom firmware is pretty boring though, it's really just a bit of a state machine to handle timings etc. I know this because we've almost completely reverse engineered the instruction set: http://bcm-v4.sipsolutions.net/802.11/Microcode (it may be slightly different in the latest devices).

I don't expect Broadcom to open up their firmware for various reasons -- for one I believe they added some sort of regulatory helper code to it. It's also a highly customized processor (see above link), so they must have a proprietary toolchain etc. Michael has an open assembler/disassembler, but who knows how their code is written -- it will certainly not be compatible with those tools.

Finally, I don't believe there's any market reason to open it. Yes, the ar9170 firmware release spawned an open source replacement that adds features -- but frankly, that didn't buy Atheros anything but wows from a few people in the community -- the chip is already EOLed afaik. And since there's no guarantee for anything like that, realistically there's little incentive for a company to spend effort on it since all the features they can/want to sell must be developed in house anyway.

Broadcom joins the Linux Foundation

Posted Jan 9, 2011 18:50 UTC (Sun) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

Yeah, as a user of AR6001 (with embedded buggy beta firmware) I've been pestering Atheros about their AR600X firmware for a long time. Surely ath5k, ath9k have embedded firmware too?

Thats very interesting about the Broadcom microcode, got a link to the assembler/disassembler?

Sadly I can only agree about incentives :(

It would be nice if at least EOLed hardware got documentation or source code dumps.

I wonder what happened to that old effort to make free firmware for the Prism54 devices.

[Off Topic] about PR S/N ratio

Posted Jan 7, 2011 8:39 UTC (Fri) by xav (guest, #18536) [Link] (1 responses)

It's astonishing how, by following the "Full Story" link and reading the entire press release, you learn nothing more than when reading the 4 lines summary.
I thank LWN for giving me only the ... let's say "news for nerds, stuff that matters" :)

[Off Topic] about PR S/N ratio

Posted Jan 7, 2011 15:01 UTC (Fri) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]

Doesn't surprise me in the least. Page-long press releases have contained about four lines of actual information for as long as I can remember.

Broadcom joins the Linux Foundation

Posted Jan 7, 2011 13:13 UTC (Fri) by sxpert (guest, #19738) [Link] (7 responses)

ok.
I want open drivers for the DSL chips !

Broadcom joins the Linux Foundation

Posted Jan 7, 2011 21:42 UTC (Fri) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link] (6 responses)

I'd suggest you buy from Sangoma, Full Linux drivers and good software to run them.

Broadcom joins the Linux Foundation

Posted Jan 8, 2011 1:45 UTC (Sat) by shemminger (subscriber, #5739) [Link] (5 responses)

That is not correct.
The Sangoma ADSL driver has binary only parts. The code for the rest of the other hardware is GPL. The developer didn't want to maintain it in mainline kernel and it was removed a couple of years ago.

Broadcom joins the Linux Foundation

Posted Jan 10, 2011 18:05 UTC (Mon) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link] (4 responses)

It was my understanding that the binary blob was just the typical little chunk of uploadable firmware they all use.

Although the drivers aren't in the mainline they have great support and make sure it builds against everything. The only pain I had was upgrading the kernel alters the symbols of course and their software won't load the driver until you run their little utility to recompile it against the kernel. Everything was automated including building and installing the object. They also include all the software necessary including handshaking and obtaining an IP which negates the need for the PPPd daemon.

I liked their stuff, particularly their extensive Linux support to the point of being the primary focus of their business as most of their business is VOIP and asterisk is a big deal to them. AFAIK they are the only internal ADSL and ADSL2 card you can buy with Linux drivers (in kernel or not).

Broadcom joins the Linux Foundation

Posted Jan 13, 2011 6:35 UTC (Thu) by xanni (subscriber, #361) [Link] (3 responses)

There are also the Traverse Technologies products:
http://www.traverse.com.au/productview.php

Broadcom joins the Linux Foundation

Posted Jan 13, 2011 12:07 UTC (Thu) by xav (guest, #18536) [Link] (2 responses)

It's not really a PCI ADSL modem. It's an ADSL modem communicating through an ethernet port, all stuck on a PCI card.
I don't see the use of this.

Broadcom joins the Linux Foundation

Posted Jan 13, 2011 12:44 UTC (Thu) by xanni (subscriber, #361) [Link]

Their old "Pulsar" ADSL1 product is a real DSL modem on a PCI card, and it looks like the Solos multi-port card is as well: "Open Source Linux ATM driver"

http://www.traverse.com.au/productview.php?product_id=116

Broadcom joins the Linux Foundation

Posted Jan 20, 2011 13:20 UTC (Thu) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link]

>It's not really a PCI ADSL modem. It's an ADSL modem communicating through an ethernet port, all stuck on a PCI card.

So is the Sangoma card, if you want the ADSL2 version.

(Also the Sangoma card seems to have problems with port forwarding. After a while (minutes, hours, or days depending on connection rate) connections to that port will just stop being forwarded until it's restarted. Since it isn't really a modem, you have very little choice but to use it as if it were a standalone router, since it doesn't have a half-bridge mode, or indeed any sensible bridging facility unless you're in a part of the world in which PPPoE bridging is an option. IE: the US. It also means you can't make bonded ADSL connections with two of them. Not that I'm bitter.)

Broadcom joins the Linux Foundation

Posted Jan 7, 2011 16:29 UTC (Fri) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link]

> Since then, the driver has been integrated into the latest Linux kernel release 2.6.37

Hm, my definition of "integrating" is another than "dumping it into the staging section".
The integration process is still going on and by no means finished.