On 04/08/2014 06:04 PM, Felix Fietkau wrote: > On 2014-04-08 17:02, Bjørn Mork wrote: >> Felix Fietkau <[email protected]> writes: >> >>> I've seen this happen to other open source related projects using >>> Marvell hardware as well, so the big question is whether Belkin can put >>> enough pressure on them to get the source code released. >>> >>> Even if that happens, the source code will most likely need a rewrite or >>> an insane amount of cleanup, as is typical for proprietary wifi drivers >>> in the embedded space. >>> >>> There are many signs that if released, the source code to this driver is >>> going to be horrible: weird function names, big module size, use of >>> custom vendor-specific hostapd and wpa_supplicant drivers. This is most >>> likely going to take a long time to resolve. >> >> I know these comments are based on experience, but I still feel you are >> a bit too pessimistic here :-) > I really do hope to be proven wrong on this one. > >> After all, we do have the mwl8k driver in mainline and Marvell has >> commited a lot to that, including the 8764 bits. It's not too unlikely >> that they will add 8864 support as well, is it? > I don't know how likely or unlikely it is. I also don't know how likely > it is that they will care about the driver enough to keep AP mode > support for embedded devices tested and working well, as opposed to just > adding it as an afterthought. > >> And wrt the size: Some >> of this is probably due to firmware being built into the module. And >> some is debugging symbols. The rest is of course bloat mostly caused by >> unnecessary reimplementation. > Right.
A driver for the Avastar 88W8764, which seams to be an older version of the driver used by Belkin for their 88W8864 was released under the terms of the GPL on github: https://github.com/kmihelich/wlan-smileplug I checked ~5 function names from this source code and found them in the binary provided by Belkin. This situation looks better than the situation around Broadcom wireless drivers. I hope Belkin gets Marvell to allow them to release at least the source code or better to get them to add support for the 88W8864 into one of their mainline wireless drivers. Hauke _______________________________________________ openwrt-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openwrt.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openwrt-devel
