On 2013-09-18 12:31 PM, James Hilliard wrote: > Aren't all the other router projects using the broadcom-wl binary's > generally sourced from GPL tarballs? although not necessarily the exact > matching ones? DD-WRT and tomato all use broadcom-wl, but I think they > use versions that are at least somewhat devices specific unlike OpenWRT > which seems to be using a single older version but and it doesn't > provide different binary's for different routers, isn't that why they > actually have proper wifi support on these routers? From what I gather > OpenWRT used this method for better kernel compatibility, but I would > say proper working WiFi is much more important than that. I'm fairly > sure the other projects have managed to work around the kernel issue for > the most part without being forced to give up on using devices specific > drivers. There are different approaches to this: DD-WRT has access to the driver sources, so it can change kernel stuff without having to worry about ABI compatibility issues (it just updates the .o files whenever kernel stuff changes). Tomato uses the old crappy Broadcom kernels and tries to stay compatible to the GPL sources as much as possible and avoids binary breakage that way. Neither approach is suitable for OpenWrt.
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