This is entirely unexpected.
This is entirely unexpected.
Posted Aug 30, 2011 11:31 UTC (Tue) by dwmw2 (subscriber, #2063)Parent article: Broadcom's wireless drivers, one year later
"Letting Broadcom invest that much work into its driver, then asking it to drop everything and support the reverse-engineered driver that it declined to support one year ago seems harsh. It's not a story that is likely to prove inspirational for developers in other companies who are considering trying to work more closely with the kernel community."That's an interesting take on it. Broadcom were told, a year ago, that it was stupid and wrong to introduce a new driver, and that they should instead focus on improving b43. Not that they should have needed telling.
Broadcom are in this position precisely because they were not "trying to work more closely with the kernel community".
And they're not even keeping up with new hardware. We now have things like BCM4331 being supported by b43 first, with no sign of support for it turning up in brcmsmac any time soon. The brcmsmac driver was always a dead end; the only potential benefit was that it might support new hardware faster, and even that turns out not to be the case.
We could probably salvage some of its PHY code it would be useful to make the PHY sub-drivers compatible between b43 and brcmsmac so they can be shared, perhaps. But the rest of it is just pointless, as far as I can tell.
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