Broadcom Open Sources Wi-Fi Drivers, Linux Users Celebrate
Broadcom Open Sources Wi-Fi Drivers, Linux Users Celebrate
Posted 09/13/2010 at 6:54am
| by Paul Lilly
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Broadcom finally answered the call for Linux users who have been pining away for open source drivers for their Broadcom wireless chips.
"Broadcom would like to announce the initial release of a fully-open Linux driver for its latest generation of 11n chipsets," Broadcom announced late last week. "The driver, while still a work in progress, is released as full source and uses the native mac80211 stack."
Broadcom went on to say that the drivers support multiple current chips (BCM4313, BCM43224, BCM43225) while also providing a framework for supporting additional chips in the future, like the mac80211-aware embedded parts.
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lien_meat
September 13, 2010 at 3:47pm
Think about all the devices these days with wifi...and a large majority have broadcom chips in them. Presently, it's about a 50% chance your broadcom based wifi supports monitor and/or promiscuous modes in the proprietary driver. Also, do you really want broadcom to have to try to keep up with all the linux kernels out there on devices (android, symbian...), apple OSes, wp7 and windows desktop OSes, vxworks (many routers run it) etc... There are more devices with wireless with more OSes out there than any one company should EVER be expected to keep up with.
This is a win for wireless implementations as a whole...not JUST in linux. Opensource != linux.
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