Atheros Hardware Abstraction Layer Source Is Released 117
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."
Sweet (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Working sleep mode? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Working sleep mode? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:OpenWRT and DD-WRT porting boosted by this? (Score:1, Informative)
Now that's just not right. OpenWrt works well with Atheros chips...
Re:QA (Score:3, Informative)
Erm...What wifi chip are you using?
The good thing about manufacturers opening their drivers is you get a completely free distro and its fully functional.
Re:Good news; but blob related? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Who is Sam Leffler? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Working sleep mode? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Interesting (Score:5, 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.
Re:OpenWRT and DD-WRT porting boosted by this? (Score:3, Informative)
When is the last time you've looked at this? The Nanostations [metrix.net], which are atheros based can run OpenWRT, DDWrt, etc. The big thing I see here is that with OSS HAL, maybe adhoc support on atheros will get better. Meraki, FON, and the ACCTON (openmesh.com) routers are all atheros too.
Re:Why are there blobs? (Score:3, Informative)
If you make the customer load up the bits, you don't have to do it in the factory.
If the manufacturers could figure out a way to make the software build the card at install time and still manage to milk the customer of money, they'd do it.
Re:OpenWRT and DD-WRT porting boosted by this? (Score:3, Informative)
Atheros-based access points do work with OpenWRT. It works better than Broadcom-based devices. I replaced a Broadcom-based device with an Atheros-based one so it would work better, and run with the Linux 2.6 kernel. Only very recently has OpenWRT been able to run a 2.6 kernel with Broadcom-based wifi because the open drivers are getting up to scratch, and even then some things still dont work as well as Atheros wifi.
The Atheros wifi on OpenWRT uses the madwifi driver, so this opening up of the HAL will still benefit OpenWRT in allowing even more sophisticated use of wifi.
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Why are there blobs? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:UK does have software patents (Score:3, Informative)
I didn't say Europe I said the UK.
because you didn't read it the first time..
I can't believe you were modded up. What stupid mods.
Open HALs and a bit of history (Score:1, Informative)
Sam deserves a huge round of applause for all the work he has put in to wireless drivers and support. The long standing criticism of his work, that it was released as a BLOB, was Atheros' choice, not his. Sam stopped direct involvement in Linux drivers a while back, but continued to release BLOBs for many platforms. His release of the HAL source was accompanied by the announcement that his HAL was no longer the reference. Thanks a Whole Lot, Sam, you sure took a lot of grief that wasn't rightfully yours.
In the last couple of years,the Madwifi team undertook the initiative to negotiate opening the HAL source. Not long after the Madwifi team took up the task, a rework of the old BSD RE effort was used as a legal jimmy and Atheros agreed to accept that work without legal assault, This became the Ath5k driver. Atheros then did something remarkable, and embraced opening the source to several of it's chip lines. They have hired staff, released the 5112 HAL. Madwifi could no longer be written off as a closed source driver, but no one has made an official release of madwifi with the released HAL, so the label remains valid. Recently Atheros has tweaked their NDA rules to permit the HAL certified folks to work on the open drivers, so progress is apace.
The entire wireless community owes Sam and the old madwifi hands, like Mike Renzmann a world of thanks, and the new HAL coders like Nick Kossifidis and Felix Fietkau all the help one can.
Re:Why are there blobs? (Score:4, Informative)
You are confusing blobs with firmware. Firmware is software run by the hardware's processor. It used to be stored in ROM, but ROM is expensive, and if the host has a lot of RAM (which any computer does in comparison to a WiFi card) it's cheaper to just give some of the RAM to the device and let it use that instead. This also has the advantage that it's easier to fix bugs in the firmware - just download a new version, rather than replacing the chip (some old cards had the ROM in a socket for doing this, but it was quite rare for anyone to actually do it).
This is not firmware, however, it is a blob. The kernel module originally just took commands from a userspace driver and passed them over the bus, much like the DRI modules. Unlike the DRI driver, the HAL was binary-only. It was originally claimed that this was required by the FCC, since with the source code anyone could modify the driver to push the card out of regulatory compliance. It was a far from satisfactory solution, however, since it meant that no one could fix the blob, and it was limited to x86-only.
Re:Well, this should brighten up Theo's day... (Score:3, Informative)
Very good. You can go take the bar exam. Meanwhile, in the real world, English is my fourth language. I'm a simple man using simple words.
So, just to double check with you - do you support or do you not support what the madwifi fuckers did with Reyk's code - specifically the reverse engineered bits?
legacy HAL (Score:2, Informative)