Return-path: Received: from kroah.org ([198.145.64.141]:45816 "EHLO coco.kroah.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-FAIL) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751930AbYJ1PUe (ORCPT ); Tue, 28 Oct 2008 11:20:34 -0400 Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2008 08:18:22 -0700 From: Greg KH To: Joerg Albert Cc: "Luis R. Rodriguez" , "otus-devel@lists.madwifi-project.org" , "linux-wireless@vger.kernel.org" , Linux-Kernel , Luis Rodriguez , Johannes Berg Subject: Re: [otus-devel] Release of Atheros 802.11n USB Linux driver Message-ID: <20081028151822.GA8783@kroah.com> (sfid-20081028_162038_803823_EE837448) References: <43e72e890810211904x7bd243dem68dfcfe7a795ec6f@mail.gmail.com> <20081022065045.GA2400@kroah.com> <20081023062655.GA8039@kroah.com> <20081023111103.GB5979@tesla> <43e72e890810271635i5b6dd6e4ua06b48e624991435@mail.gmail.com> <49071272.8050700@gmx.de> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii In-Reply-To: <49071272.8050700@gmx.de> Sender: linux-wireless-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 02:24:02PM +0100, Joerg Albert wrote: > On 10/28/2008 12:35 AM, Luis R. Rodriguez wrote: > >> This is now fixed on the master branch, also the branch "for-upstream" >> does a lot of cleanup I thought you may like before stuffing it into >> staging like removing all KERNEL_VERSION checks, all wireless >> extensions checks, some compile warnings, removal of compat, dos2unix, >> use utf-8, etc. Unfortunately this still requires a specific version >> of wpa_supplicant but it seems it works. Not sure what bars you have >> for staging at this point. > > I was a bit disappointed to find binary-only firmware inside the driver > (HalPlus/OTUS_FB50/{hpfwbu,hpfwuinit}.c which is downloaded into the device > during startup (initially thought this to be a complete OpenSource driver > :-( Binary firmware for a device does make the driver still "open source" except for how some people intrepret it. It is legal from a kernel standpoint though, and so it is fine to add to the kernel as-is. > Unless the attitude towards binary chunks inside the Linux kernel have > changed, I guess these should be moved into userspace using the > firmware_class driver to access it. Yes they should, patches gladly accepted :) thanks, greg k-h