Marvell

[Bernardo Innocenti]

David Woodhouse wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-09-10 at 22:41 -0400, Ivan Krstić wrote:
>> On Sep 10, 2007, at 9:31 PM, Bernardo Innocenti wrote:
>>> In the same thread, Ivan said he may have found a full-time person for
>>> the job (what happened, then?).
>> It was put on hold because IP issues weren't worked out, and it  
>> didn't look likely they would before first ship.

What particular IP issues?  Are there patents on 802.11s?  Even though
it's an IEEE standard?


> There was an alternative libertas driver which uses the device in 'dumb'
> mode with the kernel's mac80211 stack. Coupled with mesh support in
> mac80211 that might make a somewhat suboptimal alternative to truly free
> firmware.

Fascinating.  This way at least we use a smaller portion of the closed
firmware.  Where is this driver maintained?  And is mesh networking
really (going to be) supported in softmac?

I'd suggest whoever starts a firmware rewriting effort to go this
route, at least initially.  So they can relay on known-good mac80211
code while rewriting just a tiny low-level RF driver.

-- 
   //  Bernardo Innocenti - http://www.codewiz.org/
 \X/ One Laptop Per Child - http://www.laptop.org/