mcgrof - Slashdot User

Submission + - Open firmware released for Broadcom wireless

Submitted by mcgrof on Friday January 09, 2009 @03:03PM

mcgrof writes: Linux developers have announced the release of a reverse engineered open source firmware for Broadcom 4306 and 4318 wireless hardware, licensed under the GPLv2. "Although the base firmware is not fully 802.11 compliant, e.g., it does not support RTS/CTS procedure or QoS, we believe that someone could be interested in testing it. The firmware does not require the kernel to be modified and it uses the same shared memory layout and global registers usage of the original stuff from broadcom to ease loading by the b43 driver." You can go check out and download the firmware at the Italian Universita' Degli Studi Di Brescia Open FirmWare for WiFi networks project page. This is a good example of clean room reverse engineering design where one group worked on specifications while another worked on the the driver and the firmware. Kudos to the specification writers and bcm43xx development team for their hard work.

Submission + - Atheros unveils free Linux driver for its 802.11n (madwifi.org)

Submitted by

mcgrof

on Saturday July 26, 2008 @02:41PM

mcgrof writes: "Atheros has released a shiny new Atheros driver for all their 11n devices aimed for inclusion in the Linux kernel. This new driver has no proprietary HAL and is licensed under the ISC so the BSD community should be able to benefit as well. Note: no firmware required! Hoping rms gets to read this although I doubt he reads slashdot :)"

Submission + - MadWifi Goes Completely Open Source (kerneltrap.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 21, 2007 @03:41PM

An anonymous reader writes: The MadWifi Linux wireless developers have announced that they will be focusing entirely on their new completely open source ath5k driver, moving away from their existing "blob"-based driver. The driver adds support for the popular Atheros-based wireless networking cards, and this new open source version can finally be merged into the mainline Linux kernel, benefiting all Linux users. KernelTrap has an interesting article covering the recent announcement, and the progress and remaining issues surrounding the licensing of the new Linux driver.

Submission + - MadWifi moves away from binary-only HAL

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 21, 2007 @10:48AM

An anonymous reader writes: We, the MadWifi team, announce our decision to move away from the binary-only HAL and change the focus of our future development towards ath5k, a completely free (as in freedom) driver which will eventually become an integral part of the Linux kernel. We encourage all interested developers to join us and contribute to our efforts.
[...]
To underline our decision and commitment to ath5k we now declare MadWifi "legacy". In the long run ath5k will replace the MadWifi driver. For the time being MadWifi will still be supported, bugs will get fixed and HAL updates will be applied where possible. But it becomes unlikely that we'll see new features or go through major changes on that codebase.

http://madwifi.org/wiki/news/20070920/madwifi-moves-away-from-binary-only-hal

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