David Hollis wrote:
On Thu, 2006-01-26 at 11:04 -0800, Ben Greear wrote:
It appears to be the case. It might be technically possible to
hack up madwifi as a module w/out the HAL and force end-users to
download and install the HAL (and taint their kernel) to have a useful
setup. That would go against much of what Linux stands for though,
so I doubt it would be acceptable.
If someone has a reverse-engineered HAL that might could
be used as well.
I don't think that would fly based on past precedents. Leaving some
kind of hook for the proprietary binary isn't allowed (see the PWC
camera driver problems from a year or so back), and you can't have a
module in the kernel that won't build unless you pull down another .o
file to link against or whatever. What we have seen is permitted is a
driver that requires a closed binary firmware to be loaded to operate
(ipw2x00, prism54). I don't know the details of the Atheros chip to
know if it might be possible to generate a firmware that users would
have to install in /lib/firmware and let the driver load it up. If so,
that would be the answer.
The HAL is not real firmware..just normal kernel code. I wonder if you
could get around this by using a sort of CPU emulator and/or virtual machine
and load the HAL 'firmware' into that?
Ben
--
Ben Greear <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Candela Technologies Inc http://www.candelatech.com
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe netdev" in
the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
