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Post by cybrguy on May 28, 2012 13:26:50 GMT -5
I am starting this thread only as a reminder. In another thread Kevin indicated that Atheros has been very stingy with their specs and hasn't made technical info available for this wireless chipset at this time. I am hoping that down the road Atheros will be more forthcoming and Kevin can add this chipset to those compatible with KNOS. knosproject.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=knos9&thread=188&page=1#867 |
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Post by Kevin McAleavey on May 28, 2012 22:40:01 GMT -5
BSD folks ARE working on it, as are the Linux folks as well. And sadly the Linux folks aren't getting anywhere fast either. They're working on what they call an "ATH9K" driver for that series and they're having all sorts of problems with it. Atheros was one of the absolute best companies as far as driver support for non-Windows systems for many years. That's why our support for older Atheros stuff is so solid.
Unfortunately, last year, Atheros was acquired by Qualcomm and they're as bad as Broadcom for "Windows only" in their designs. Now ... I can understand how highly competitive wireless is and the problem with "open source" particularly under Linux' GPL is where you have to publish EVERYTHING. That actively discourages companies that are paranoid about their "intellectual property" ending up in the hands of their competitors from touching that "third rail" of open sourcing. The Linux GPL is a really bad thing in their eyes.
However, KNOS is BSD and the BSD license openly embraces "non-disclosure" which means that if a company like Broadcom or Qualcomm wanted to work with us to develop a driver for us or BSD in general, it's perfectly OK for us *NOT* to publish any of their private stuff and even employ compiled binaries that they provide with no obligation on our part to "pass it on" like happens with GPL and Linux. But so far, no go with them. The OLD Atheros was nothing like these birds.
All I can add right now is that there's folks in BSD land and among our folks here that are actively trying to modify existing Atheros code in our possession (technically called "clean room reverse engineering") but so far the designs in that chipset are SO obtuse that nobody's had any success so far. But we ARE trying!
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