On Thu, Apr 23, 2020 at 02:52:09AM -0300, Anatoli wrote: > How do the same drivers work in Linux? Can't "we" "just" "copy" the code > from there?
That's already what we are doing. But porting (what you call "just copying") code is a lot of work, too. This stuff needs a lot of attention to detail to work right and there is already too much divergance between any of these kernels for cp -R to produce a useful result. And apart from a working wifi device you would like the code that runs on your CPU to be audited as well, no? > Or does the GPL licensing absolutely prevents from analyzing > Linux code and using their implementation details? Linux has some BSD-licensed drivers and we are already porting them. A lot of iwm(4), iwx(4), and bwfm(4) code came from Linux. There's a plan to port ath10k code from Linux but that project is stuck due to lack of time because there is too much to do. This problem isn't specific to OpenBSD either. I am getting regular email from people trying to port iwx(4) from OpenBSD to FreeBSD, and not being able to get it to work even though the driver works on OpenBSD.
