Re: Linux Incompatibility List

Andrew Miklas
2004-08-21T23:55:43Z

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Hi,

On August 21, 2004 04:51 pm, Wakko Warner wrote:
<snip>
> Does any broadcom
> wireless chip work on linux (ndis wrapper or that piece of junk from
> linuxant doesn't count)

Yeah, their wireless chips work fine on Linux if you are running just about
any wireless access point / router that makes use of Broadcom's hardware.

That probably seems like a pointless nitpick, but I think that makes their
non-support of Linux on general-purpose hardware even worse. They've already
written wireless drivers for Linux, but simply refuse to work with anyone to
get their hardware running under Linux for other architectures. They even
refuse to simply recompile their driver for i386 and release it binary-only.
For that matter, they won't even respond to e-mail on the subject. (The most
I've ever got from them was a few engineers responding 'off the record'.)

Even more annoying is the way their Linux/MIPSel binaries are tied to a
particular kernel version. (They've got the inlines from skbuff.h scattered
all over their module --- at least they did in the driver included with the
Linksys WAP54G v. 1.08 which was the one I carefully looked at.) This
creates a serious problem for anyone who wants to get their wireless
routers / access points to run a different version of the kernel.

They seem to be very selective about when they acknowledge Linux's existence.
IMHO, this makes them even worse than a company that has decided to simply
ignore Linux all together.

- -- Andrew
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