Submitted by LWN reports: When kernel developers talk about problematic hardware vendors, Atheros often appears near the top of their lists. So this announcement from Luis Rodriguez, a developer of the reverse-engineered ath5k driver, is intriguing: “I write to you to inform you that I have decided to join Atheros as a full time employee, as a Software Engineer, to help them with their goals and mission to get every device of Atheros supported upstream in the Linux kernel.” What will come of this remains to be seen, but if it truly signals a change of heart at Atheros, it is a most welcome development.
Title says it all, I have to go through all sorts of gyrations to get my cheap Atheros-based nic to behave nicely with some Linux distros
for them to release the chipset specs beforehand than not and now have to employ someone to bump up their credits.
I only hope it won’t benefit only to Linux (GPL…).
I hear ya. Seems unnecessary to hire that guy if they would have just made the documentation available. If the docs were available then everyone would have benefited. Everyone being the BSD camp, Linux camp, Solaris camp, and others.
>Atheros Hires ath5k Developer
Well well, just a minor detail it’s a port of the original OpenBSD driver.
This probably has something to do with the success of the eeepc and all of its clones. Atheros is probably seeing the benefit of having drivers in the kernel as mini notebooks with GNU/Linux get more popular.
There is a whole new class of machine opening up.
Microsoft have come up with a new term to describe them: “Ultra low cost PCs” or ULCPCs. Microsoft have even extended the life of XP Home to try to cater for this market … because each and every manufacturer is offering a Linux option on their ULCPC.
There are at least six manufacturers who have a machine lined up for this market … the EEEPC and the XO OLPC laptops were just the beginning.
Since they all run Linux, and they all have wireless connectivity … this amounts to literally millions of machines that will require a wireless chip this year which must have a Linux driver. ASUS alone expects to sell 6 million machines … even if over 50% of those have Windows installed on delivery … they will still be the same machine in hardware terms as the ones which have Linux installed … so all 6 million units must have a wireless chip that has a Linux driver available for it.
That is just one manufacturer. So we are talking sales here of perhaps 20 million units a year for any manufacturer of a decent, low cost wireless chip which has a good Linux driver.
Not to be sneezed at.
I am happy to hear this. The ath5k driver saved me from having to use ndiswrapper on my HP laptop. I look forward to this support being available in the stock kernel.
Same thing with my ACER laptop. It has this chipset too, one of the newer ones and never works properly with WiFi so I use wired LAN most of the time I am home.