[Gllug] wifi card

[Russell Howe]

On Sat, Jul 30, 2005 at 04:00:21PM +0100, Mike Brodbelt wrote:
> You should add to that paragraph that madwifi drivers taint the kernel,
> as they include a proprietary HAL

All this 'HAL' stuff that manufacturers talk about is rubbish. What they
mean is "Only part of the driver is open source - the rest is binary
only".

> Anyone wanting to build wireless router type things (as opposed to
> adding wireless to an existing Linux system) would be well advised to
> have a look at OpenBSD.

OpenBSD have also reverse-engineered the binary chunk of the madwifi
drivers, meaning that OpenBSD is the first OS to have open source
drivers for an 802.11g card.

I expect someone will invest some time and effort shoehorning OpenBSD's
code to link against the madwifi source, although I doubt the madwifi
people will commit it to their CVS, as they insist that it's against
the US FCC rules to have opensource drivers for the Atheros chipset.
Whether they're talking crap or not, I don't know, but they seem quite
committed to keeping a binary only chunk in their driver.

-- 
Russell Howe       | Why be just another cog in the machine,
rhowe at siksai.co.uk | when you can be the spanner in the works?
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