Hello John, Samuel, > Well, at least part of the answer is "I'm not done yet". I am still > collecting code and figuring-out how to get it all into one tree. > > But, the main answer has to do with the intellectual property > (i.e. copyright) issues concerning the HAL. My understanding is > that the HAL currently used by the madwifi stack is not available > under a license compatible with being included in the Linux kernel. > Am I mistaken?
I think that Samuel's question had more to do with having the madwifi stack in your branch, rather than the driver proper. From having used it for the prism54-softmac project, the madwifi stack really can be used stand-alone, without any reference to the HAL. > I think it is very important to get a driver into the kernel > which supports the Atheros hardware. At present, the driver from > www.ath-driver.org seems the most promising. Although, some have > expressed legal concerns about it as well. Anyone have any clarifying > opinions about that driver? No opinion about ath-driver.org. But OpenBSD has an open-source HAL, which is meant to be a drop-in replacement for the closed-source HAL. This could be used at least as a basis for a clean-room implementation, which would clear all legal concerns. Code can be found on: http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/sys/dev/ic/ See arXXXX files. As far as reverse-engeneering is concerned : The problem of the atheros HAL is that is does the transport of data to the card itself (DMA, register writes). Compare this with Connexant's 'umac' designs, where the binary code is transport-independent, and the transport is done by open-source code. With the HAL, you cannot intercept data going in and out of the binary-only part, leaving only decompiling as an option for reverse-engeneering. And it prevents moving this part to userland, as someone already said. > Are there any other options for supporting the Atheros hardware within > the kernel? This should be fairly easy, it seems, to completely rewrite a driver based on the above info. All the data's available in C, at least for the older chipsets - don't really know about newer ones. If only I had time for this :) Jean-Baptiste - 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
