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Atheros Releases Free Linux Driver For Its 802.11n Devices
mcgrof writes "Atheros has released a shiny new Atheros driver for all their 11n devices aimed for inclusion in the Linux kernel. This new driver has no proprietary HAL and is licensed under the ISC license, so the BSD community should be able to benefit as well. Note: no firmware required!"
No blob, ISC license, and supporting .11n? That only leaves one question: is there a miniPCI card available containing this chipset that I can plug into a little router board?
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Does anybody know the HW capabilities of the Atheros chipset?
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I think the point is pretty clear. Atheros realises that it might be cheaper, in the long run, to add a memory chip to the chipset that contains a firmware, than actually uploading it everytime or using a wintel solution to control the hardware in a way that the FCC stays happy.
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How does this affect 802.11 B and G devices? Can I expect greater stability in those products, or does this only help out 802.11n hardware?
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No, really, this is GREAT news all around and I can't think of a catch. Kudos Atheros!
Atheros hired Luis R. Rodriguez, the developer of the Linux kernel Atheros driver, back in April with the intention of doing just this. Congratulations!
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I have. Screw Broadcom. Anyone who buys their products deserves the hell they are helping to support.
Broadcom is EXTREMELY anal retentive about anything that looks remotely proprietary. On their CPU's, they dropped Linux support for the Sibyte stuff that they bought up as soon as they could. I know some guys who are stuck having to support development efforts with such products, and my heart goes out to them.
The one good bit of news is that they do have a suppposedly serious effort on the Wifi side. The bad news is that they have some very bad engineers doing it. Let me give you an example. The main guy in charge, who thinks he's God gift to Linux (and of course, no one's ever heard of him), decided to do a complete BSP *from scratch* for this effort.
Needless to say, the work is behind schedule. Oh, and they don't have any real plans in place to support it. It's the toss-it-over-the-wall and move on to the next platform approach.
This is crazy, expensive and of course a lot of work. I'm not a fan of Windriver, and far less so of Montavista. But honestly, for the $10-20 grand they cost, that's cheap in comparison to what Broadcom is trying (and failing) to pull off.
Even if they do actually manage to get something out, expect a low quality half-assed effort. That is, expect lots of bugs.
And that assumes that Broadcom WILL actually decide to release the source. That decision hasn't been made, last I heard.
I haven't looked at the Atheros stuff yet. But the fact that they are out there, and will be for a long time at the way Broadcom is going, seems to speak of them being quite clueful.
I can totally relate to your frustration. In the process of getting an atheros chipset to work, I spent AT LEAST 50 hours drudging forums, mailing lists, and man pages. However, I did get it to work, using a forum hack.
During that ordeal, I learned a great deal about Linux...I went from clueless to competent. I learned to make symbolic links, regular expressions..even some shell scripting. I use a bash script every time I need to browse the web. --I could probably automate this script, but I'm happy to be connected for right nOW..
BCM supports linux for other chipsets directly, go look on their website they provide GPL'd drivers for a bunch of stuff, just not the BCM94311 cores for some reason, probably licensing.
I have a dv5030us of the dv5000 series. But this applies to nearly all Pavilion models. If you take out the Broadcom card and replace it with something that is not Broadcom (or does not have its ID in the BIOS), then the BIOS will boot and say "Unsupported hardware detected. Remove and reboot." I wanted official support for wireless. I bought an Atheros card off eBay, installed it, got exactly what everyone was saying it would do. Then, I found this web site: http://www.richud.com/HP-Pavilion-104-Bios-Fix/ . And, I had to hex edit my BIOS and reflash as well. Quite something, HP, doing a hardware lock-in with a vendor who refuses to release specs on their hardware.
Anyone know of a good WAP that uses the Atheros chipset? I have a Linksys WRT600N (wifi-N, GbE and USB) and while their European models use Atheros, the U.S. models use Broadcom chipsets.
Come to think of it, anyone interested in doing a little gray market exporting?
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How did you get an Atheros in your Santa Rosa? Lucky bastard. Most of them have the Broadcom 4328 which is wireless-n and apparently is far away from being reverse engineered. https://lists.berlios.de/pipermail/bcm43xx-dev/2008-May/007517.html The broadcom linux wireless driver project doesn't have enough people willing and able to reverse engineer that card and the wireless n layer it seems.
So which are the laptops with Broadcom chips? I know my Presario V3000 has but I didn't know that when I bought it. I'll be looking more closely for my next laptop purchase. Is there is up-to-date somewhere that I can check?
Buy hardware, and if it doesn't contain the right chipset send it back to the manufacturer with the reason for the return ("Unlabeled change in chipset, product is no longer compatible").
I've seen some hardware have the chipset printed on the box. My PCMCIA card from Netgear incidentally had the Atheros logo on the box.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I haven't looked at the ath9k driver code, but based on the web pages, it appears that what's different is that they finally decided that publishing the driver source code doesn't violate FCC regulations. I don't see any indication that they've pushed any of it into the chip set; rather it appears that it will be in a new CRDA daemon.
If anything, Atheros would care more about cost-reducing the chip set by moving more functionality to the host processor, even if that made it harder to support free software.
Awesome, spectacular and I hope everyone buys atheros based chipsets.
Hopefully with a concerted effort we can provide atheros enough cash to buy broadcom, fire its board, and can its management.
Then, have a massive open source party wuv fest with opening the broadcom chipsets and publishing the specifications.
I am pleased that at least, some manufacturers are beginning to see, that open hardware yields better drivers and better experience for the consumer.
I hope it continues.
VIA, Atheros look like they just "get it".
Awesome.
-Hackus
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.