LWN: Comments on "Larry Finger RIP"

Thank you Larry

paralin — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 20:39:39 +0000

I used Larry's wireless packages extensively and greatly appreciate his work. It is a great shame to hear of his loss. Rest In Peace Larry. Our thoughts are with you.

Oh no :(

flussence — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 13:34:10 +0000

This is exactly what I meant, yes.

Oh no :(

mb — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 10:17:51 +0000

I don't think this is a correct description of the open source Broadcom Wifi driver ecosystem.
There are many drivers, but they hardly have any functional overlap with each other. There are many generations of devices with literally hundreds of different possible internal combinations. Each driver supports a certain subset of these combinations.

But let's talk about Larry instead.

He was a major contributor to the whole Broadcom driver ecosystem. Not only by writing code, but also by mentoring people.
There are only a handful of people in the Open Source world who understand the hardware to some deeper detail level.
Larry was one of them.
He mentored other people to get the Broadcom Open Source code into kernel.

And I think it was a huge success. And that was only a small part of Larry's success story.

Rest in peace Larry

PhilPotter — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 07:22:11 +0000

Thank you for all your contributions, it was a great pleasure working with you on rtl8188eu / r8188eu. The world, and particularly the Linux kernel sphere, is worse off without you.

Oh no :(

farnz — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 07:01:35 +0000

If you read it as "the moves that have happened to replace Larry's great work are regressions", then yes, it is - it's pointing out that even with manufacturer support (and hence access to private documentation and similar), Larry's work is still better, even though Larry can no longer improve it.

Oh no :(

pizza — Sun, 23 Jun 2024 23:57:20 +0000

> A lot of people were worried that they'd ruin Atheros when they bought them out and, well, those people were right.

As someone who had the misfortune of having to interact with Atheros in their pre-Qualcomm days... it was a difference of degree only.

Oh no :(

cytochrome — Sun, 23 Jun 2024 23:34:51 +0000

Was that an appropriate comment on an article focused on honouring the contributions of Larry Finger?

Oh no :(

flussence — Sun, 23 Jun 2024 22:37:44 +0000

Wasn't going to name names, but since we're here: I think Broadcom's "official" brcmfmac driver getting into mainline was a huge regression. Barely works on any hardware I've tried it on, they did the corporate bully thing of throwing it over the wall and vanishing, and overnight it wiped out the care and effort that went into b43 - because someone (I don't care to find out who) said "we don't need this any more" and punted it from the tree.

While I'm on the subject, I recently discovered Qualcomm's ath6kl is... bad. Not at all like the 5k or 9k I've used. Downloading random blobs off a third-party github repo found in a search engine, having to manually poke USB IDs to get the driver to load, and when it finally does, dmesg turns into a bright red fireworks display and there's very little in the way of 802.11 going on. A lot of people were worried that they'd ruin Atheros when they bought them out and, well, those people were right.

(I'm still careful about which hardware I buy, but I can't fix other people's laptops I'm tasked with resurrecting. I can and have plugged a realtek dongle into them as a "temporary" workaround though!)

A kernel hacker’s eulogy

dmv — Sun, 23 Jun 2024 18:54:41 +0000

I’m a complete outsider and observer out of sheer curiosity, so didn’t know him (or y’all), but this really moved me. I just wanted to say thanks to y’all for doing this: recounting the contributions of the deceased (may he RIP), giving him his kernel hacker’s eulogy.

Oh no :(

mb — Sun, 23 Jun 2024 18:28:38 +0000

Larry was part of the team who reverse engineered the Broadcom binary device drivers. Back in the day, when there was basically no Open Source code from Broadcom themselves for the Wifi IP.

Larry is responsible for getting the let's call it "second generation" of b43 WiFi PHYs working by reverse engineering the needed information from register access dumps mainly.

But it wouldn't have been Larry, if he had stopped there.

After he successfully mastered that work to get working Broadcom wireless drivers out to the people, he went on to work on many more things. But he always kept contributing maintenance work to the Broadcom driver.

Oh no :(

flussence — Sun, 23 Jun 2024 17:45:13 +0000

Massive respect for anyone who wades into that stuff.

I remember how rough Wi-Fi used to be in the old days. It still is if you lose the hardware vendor lottery, but much less so than in the days of ndiswrapper. It's possible to plug in a random USB dongle nowadays and *not* be surprised when it just works.

It looks like he contributed a lot to the realtek drivers... I've seen and had very few complaints about those. Thank you Larry.

RIP + bug

aviallon — Sun, 23 Jun 2024 15:46:56 +0000

Rest In Peace you who contributed so much to the Linux kernel.

PS : the link to the kernel source database seems broken.

Oh no :(

mb — Sun, 23 Jun 2024 15:41:59 +0000

Larry, I will miss you.

It was a great pleasure to work together with you.
You were a great developer and a great person. I learnt a lot from you.

Linux Wireless would not be what it is today and what it had been in the past, if Larry had not been here.
Larry's Free Software heritage will continue to live.

RIP

dvejmz — Sun, 23 Jun 2024 15:13:42 +0000

Rest in peace, Larry.