2014-04-08 17:02 GMT+02:00, Bjørn Mork <bj...@mork.no>: > Felix Fietkau <n...@openwrt.org> writes: > >> I've seen this happen to other open source related projects using >> Marvell hardware as well, so the big question is whether Belkin can put >> enough pressure on them to get the source code released. >> >> Even if that happens, the source code will most likely need a rewrite or >> an insane amount of cleanup, as is typical for proprietary wifi drivers >> in the embedded space. >> >> There are many signs that if released, the source code to this driver is >> going to be horrible: weird function names, big module size, use of >> custom vendor-specific hostapd and wpa_supplicant drivers. This is most >> likely going to take a long time to resolve. > > I know these comments are based on experience, but I still feel you are > a bit too pessimistic here :-) Felix is not pessimistic; he knows better than most the high amount of job and problems that generate a wifi driver with such few information and, in addition it seems to use a different API. Take in mind that the Broadcom wireless proprietary driver generate some problems from time to time. > > After all, we do have the mwl8k driver in mainline and Marvell has > commited a lot to that, including the 8764 bits. It's not too unlikely > that they will add 8864 support as well, is it? And wrt the size: Some > of this is probably due to firmware being built into the module. And > some is debugging symbols. The rest is of course bloat mostly caused by > unnecessary reimplementation. > > > Bjørn
In my opinion you are too confident about the similarities between mwifiex[1], mwl8k[2] and the Avastar 88W8864 drivers. How much wireless ICs aren't supported in linux and how much of them have required a lot of job doing reverse engineering or clean room development? Being optimistic Marvell will release a binary file with some additional code to "interface" with the OpenWRT wireless subsystem. We will not see a free functional driver in months or ages. Regards: Pepe [1]: http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/mwifiex [2]: http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/mwl8k > _______________________________________________ > openwrt-devel mailing list > openwrt-devel@lists.openwrt.org > https://lists.openwrt.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openwrt-devel > _______________________________________________ openwrt-devel mailing list openwrt-devel@lists.openwrt.org https://lists.openwrt.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openwrt-devel
