Atheros lets open source devs in on the WiFi party
By Jacob Schulman 
posted Dec 2nd 2008 3:05AM
posted Dec 2nd 2008 3:05AM
In a move that will undoubtedly increase its street cred among technophiles and tinkerers alike, Atheros announced that it's releasing the specs to allow open source drivers for its ATH5K and ATH9K chip families. The move comes after Atheros first released some open source drivers for newer 802.11n chipsets and now the company is finally opening up its HAL (hardware abstraction layer) to developers, even using Linux as the reference public code base. No word on when any of this stuff will be released, but rest assured, we'll be on the lookout for more info -- we're sure the hackers out there are champing at the bit.
Sweetness
let's get cracki*n*!
http://www.engadget.com/2008/06/05/broadcom-co-founder-allegedly-spiked-tech-execs-drinks-had-wa/
Did someone say 'crack'?
If you play your cards right, you may convince Broadcom's Henry T. Nicholas III to support Linux. He likes his crack.
Woo Hoo! The last limitation of linux is slowly decaying as more and more companies do exactly this. Though in the defense of many hardware makers like Atheros: much of the time, it is component part suppliers that won't agree to publishing hardware specs rather than the parents company itself. But no matter who was holding up this release, thanks for finally coming around!
This is actually old - Atheros released the Ath5k ABG HAL in September, it's been available at http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/mcgrof/legacy-hal.tar.bz2
This is NOT the same HAL as used by the Madwifi drivers, however - it's the commercial HAL provided to licensed partners and won't work with madwifi, but is an excellent reference for the fully-open hal-less ath5k kernel drivers.
Fortunately, five days ago, Sam Leffler released the Madwifi HAL as well, http://madwifi-project.org/wiki/news/20081129/sam-leffler-releases-hal-source which is the HAL everyone knows and is drop-in usable with madwifi (and BSD drivers)
*sigh* I just bought a new intel card to replace my laptop's atheros so I could have some better linux support. Oh well :)
Funny, I just got an Atheros so I could get better support than my built-in Marvell (wich has no drivers at all, I had to use ndiswrapper.. And it was very unstable)
> are champing at the bit.
Hm, perhaps they are chomping?