Fwd: [LUG@IITD:9579] Broadcom makes its Wi-Fi chipsets more Linux friendly

[pahnin sd]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Alok Singh Mahor <alok...@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Sep 10, 2010 at 2:34 PM
Subject: [LUG@IITD:9579] Broadcom makes its Wi-Fi chipsets more Linux friendly
To: iitdlug <iit...@googlegroups.com>


source: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/broadcom-makes-its-wi-fi-chipsets-more-linux-friendly/138

Slowly, too darn slowly for the taste of Linux notebook users,
Broadcom has been providing drivers for its Wi-Fi chipsets on netbooks
and laptops. Now, Broadcom has released an open-source driver for its
latest 802.11n chip sets.

See? Miracles do happen!

According to Henry Ptasinski, a principal scientist in the wireless
connectivity group at Broadcom, Broadcom has released the source code
for the “initial release of a fully-open Linux driver for it’s latest
generation of 11n chipsets. The driver, while still a work in
progress, is released as full source and uses the native mac80211
stack. It supports multiple current chips (BCM4313, BCM43224,
BCM43225) as well as providing a framework for supporting additional
chips in the future, including mac80211-aware embedded chips.”

For Linux users who aren’t Wi-Fi engineers that means you can look
forward to your laptops with Broadcom chipsets working properly with
Linux. It took Broadcom long enough! Other Wi-Fi chipset companies
like Intel and Atheros have have long done a reasonable job of
natively supporting Linux for years.

But, don’t get too excited yet. These aren’t finished drivers. For the
moment, you’ll need to build them yourself from the source code. For
those of you who are comfortable with ‘make’ and the like you can get
the code from the Linux kernel git repository in the
drivers/staging/brcm80211 directory.

The good news for most users is that these drivers are on their way to
the main Linux kernel distribution. In a Twitter note, Greg
Kroah-Hartman, head of the Linux Driver Project and a Novell engineer
wrote that the “Linux Broadcom wireless driver is now open and in the
staging kernel tree will be merged in 2.6.37.” What that means for
most people is that you’ll see full Broadcom support baked in to Linux
distributions arriving in early 2011.

You may not have to wait that long though. Canonical, according to
Jeremy Foshee, an Ubuntu kernel developer, hopes to have the new
Broadcom Wi-Fi drivers in its upcoming Ubuntu 10.10 release, and may
backport the drivers to the current stable version, Ubuntu 10.04.

I’ve also talked to openSUSE and Fedora developers, and they tell me
that their distributions have similar plans. This may be one
small-step for Wi-Fi users in general, but it’s one giant leap for
Linux Wi-Fi users.


--
Alok Singh Mahor
CSE, IIT Delhi
www.alokmahor.tk

Join the next generation of computing, Open Source, and Linux/GNU!

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