Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Atheros Hardware Abstraction Layer Source Is Released

Posted by kdawson on from the no-blobs-here dept.

chrb writes "With the recent discussion here on proprietary blobs in the Linux kernel, it's nice to see that today Sam Leffler has released the source for the Atheros Hardware Abstraction Layer under the ISC license, which is both GPL and BSD compatible. The Atheros chipset is used in many laptops, so this is another important step towards running a completely free distribution."

4 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Working sleep mode? by ristretto_dreams · · Score: 4, Informative

    ermm, I think the problem here is that the OP is referring to two different things, "sleep" and "hibernate", but unless I am incorrectly remembering my ACPI (which is quite possible), Linux is in fact, if not "in charge once the machine is alseep", at least in charge of correctly putting all various pieces of the system into S3 sleep mode correctly. I know that for a long time my Thinkpad had powerdrain problems in S3 because of incorrectly suspended wifi. For hibernate mode (assuming true write to disk and power off), then of course Linux isn't in charge.

  2. Re:Who is Sam Leffler? by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 4, Informative

    It is nice to have an open source driver released, but it is NOT nice that an individual have to go jump through hoops and write it himself to make it happen.

    That's how a lot of them happen. What's worse is when an individual, or team of individuals, work for years to make some proprietary code unnecessary, all of the time knowing that only when they are done will the manufacturer of the proprietary code place it in Open Source.

    --
    Bruce Perens.
  3. Re:Interesting by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 4, Informative

    I have a new Acer Aspire One, with Atheros wireless, and have mostly got it running Debian properly - the biggest bugs I'm seeing may be in Debian Lenny rather than anything about Aspire One. A nice thing about this HAL release is that it makes Sam's virtual WAP software unquestionably Free - even from the BSD perspective. Did you ever want to connect to all of the WAPs you can reach at once, and be two or three different WAPs for others at the same time, all without carrying extra hardware? Sam's code can do that.

    Being someone who speaks publicly about Open Source, I want to be seen using 100% Open Source. If you're going to talk the talk, you should walk the walk too.

    --
    Bruce Perens.
  4. Re:Interesting by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 4, Informative

    i mean it is nice to open source their code, but given that it has pretty much been reverse engineered already, isn't it a bit late!?

    Especially since the kernel developers aren't going to let anything with a HAL into Linus' tree, entirely for architectural reasons. But it makes the best version of the driver at the moment fully free.

    --
    Bruce Perens.