Bob Heise wrote: > fredag 05 januari 2007 20:00 skrev Larry Finger: >> Broadcom has made a conscious decision not to support Linux, which is the >> reason for this reverse-engineering project. The usual reason is that an >> open-source driver would expose their intellectual property to the >> competition. Writing or calling them will have no effect. They will say >> that if you want to use their product, then you need to run OS X or >> Windows. Under Linux, you can always use ndiswrapper. Of course, if you >> have a crash while running this way, you can kiss Linux kernel support >> goodbye. > > That sucks. When the driver you guys have written works really well, people > will buy broadcom's hardware because it has good linux support and > unknowingly give broadcom tacit approval for these shenannigans, (no specs > _and_ pci devices that use 30-bit DMA). Though I guess not having any useable > driver is worse...
I cannot blame them too much for the 30-bit DMA design defect. When the b4400 and the initial bcm43xx chips came out, a main memory of more than 1 GB was hardly conceivable and 256 MB was sufficient. Who knew that Windows would bloat to the point that 1 GB starts to become the minimum, which pushed the motherboard makers to allow 2 GB or more. My 30-bit Linksys WPC54G V1 is at least 4 years old. By the time they got to V3, it had 32-bit DMA. Larry _______________________________________________ Bcm43xx-dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/bcm43xx-dev
