Re: Which Kernel for Airport Support?
On Thu, Feb 24, 2005 at 05:10:44PM -0700, Mauro wrote:
> > On Thu, Feb 24, 2005 at 05:23:03PM +0000, Ben Hill wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > I'm currently using kernel 2.6.8-powerpc after a vanilla install of
> > > Debian.
> >
> > Sure, does, just modprobe airport, or add it to /etc/modules.
> >
> > It is not a pci device, so discover/hotplug don't seem to be able to get them.
> On Thu, 2005-24-02 at 19:48 +0100, Sven Luther wrote:
>
> >
> > Airport extreme is not supported though, and never will be.
> >
>
> You speak in such absolutes! Do you know something the rest of us
> don't? Are your privy to info the rest of us humans are not? Perhaps
> you're not aware of
Well, it has been like that since ages, there have been numerous threads here
about this subject, and that was the consensus. Furthermore broadcom is having
an actively anti-linux stance, which makes me affirm the above, in the same
way that i can without much risk affirm that nvidia will never give their
specs out.
> Here's snipit from the corresponding forum:
> "> And do you think ppc will be supported?
Can you please provide a pointer to your sources ?
> I'm not working on the driver, so I don't really know,
> but since the point here is precisely to get a Free driver,
> we would have the full source, so it would be just a matter
> of handling any endianness (order of bytes in a word)
> issues, and compiling for PPC. Since the original code
> (disassembly?) on which this development is based was
> for the MIPS CPUs, I suspect this aspect is already taken
> care of. IIRC, MIPS worked in big-endian, just like PPC.
> Hence this shouldn't be a problem specially if some
> people, like you and me, test the experimental drivers as
> soon as they start working on x86 to help the developers
> debug any remaining problem.
Oh, so a dissassembling effort is made. I see three ways for airport extreme
linux support, and none of them involve broadcom releasing drivers :
1) someone does the reverse engineering effort, like above.
2) someone gets the mac-os-x drivers to work on linux, a bit like the x86
ndiswrapper thingy.
3) someone does a hardware development based on a chip with freely available
driver. I was myself lending in this direction, and planning on a
free-hardware project around the ralink chip. In very early stages yet
though.
> By: Kendall Blake - kendallemm
> RE: Airport extreme?
> 2003-10-26 12:34
> Nothing is supported just yet, however, once the 4306 is supported, it
> should be trivial to make sure it works with Mac & other PPC hardware.
>
> The MIPS code which is being disassembled is little-endian, but we
> shouldn't have much trouble getting big-endian support in the module.
Ok, nice, feel free to contribute to that effort, all here will thank you
about that.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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