There are some issues and/or bugs in the packaging of the firmware for a few USB atheros chipsets. The firmware-atheros package is in the non-free repository and while this would be the correct place a few years ago it no longer is for some atheros firmware.
The firmware for the Atheros USB chipsets AR9170, AR7010, and AR9271 have been released under Debian compatible free software licenses. The AR9170 firmware included in the firmware-atheros package is also out of date. The kernel no longer supports the AR9170 firmware. The driver and firmware which replaced it is Carl9170. This has been true since the 3.0 kernel. The one that I am primarily concerned about getting fixed is the ath9k_htc as my company sells a USB wifi adapter for GNU/Linux and we would prefer if it worked 'out of the box' across as many distributions as possible. It is the chipset used in current generation USB adapters. The carl9170 firmware/driver which supports the AR9170 chipset we only recently discontinued. However we would like to see it supported down the road. Given its free software status and upstream support there isn't a good reason (as far as I can see) why support should be dropped. I feel it is very important to support these chipsets as they are the only USB wifi N chipsets that are 100% free software friendly and a lot of work has gone into getting the code cleaned up and released. Besides myself there have been many other people who have volunteered there time to make it happen (Luis, Adrian, people at the FSF, maintainers of other distributions/kernels, etc). We can do testing with various atheros N USB adapters and/or provide developers / QA / etc with adapters. Please let me know what I can do to move this along- if anything. Here are some links for the ath9k_htc_open firmware (AR9271 & AR7010 chipsets): http://wireless.kernel.org/en/developers/GSoC/2012/ath9k_htc_open_firmware wifi chipsets carl9170 firmware & ath9k_htc_open firmware Here are some links for the carl9170 (AR9170 chipset): http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/carl9170 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-kernel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/e6fd628dcf083bc877d5749b588d49cc.squir...@mail.errtech.com
