Hi all, Once again, someone is trying to build a working driver for the Marvel 88w8335 chipset, and is once again hampered by a lack of re-distributable or official firmware. (See: http://marc.info/?l=linux-wireless&m=128923265210125&w=2 ) As such, on Denis's behalf, I'm asking if anyone knows of anyone at Marvel that they can poke in an attempt to get a re-distributable firmware for this chipset released for eventual inclusion into linux-firmware. I believe that this chipset is pretty much obsolete (being only an 802.11g part) so I cannot see any reasonable reason not to release the firmware, especially given that newer chipsets ("TopDog" - see the mwl8k driver) have had re-distributable firmware released along with open source Linux drivers for some time now. If we cannot obtain proper firmware files, the very least Marvel could do would be to bless the *BSD Malo driver's firmware files (obtainable here: http://www.nazgul.ch/malo/malo-firmware-1.4.tgz - see http://www.unix.com/man-page/freebsd/4/MALO/ for more info) with a proper re-distributable license. In terms of the actual chipsets in question, I'm referring to the 88w8335, 88w8338, and 88w8385 chipsets. I believe Marvel refers to them as being part of the "Libertas" family of chipsets - however they don't have the fancy mesh stuff that the chips the libertas driver talks to have - and are also PCI. A previous effort in 2008 is viewable here: http://lwn.net/Articles/275719/ and searching for "mrv8k" reveals the remnants of that effort which mostly happened before my involvement in this. A proper "official" set of firmware files would smooth one of the bumps in getting proper support for this driver into the Linux Kernel. (as well as helping the BSD folks with the Malo driver) Marvel has shown that they are willing to provide some support for the open source community with the TopDog driver, as well as the driver for the SAS chipset. Hopefully they can continue their support with what would be a small gesture in support of our efforts to write a driver for this old chipset. Thanks, -- Julian Calaby Email: julian.calaby@xxxxxxxxx Profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/julian.calaby/ .Plan: http://sites.google.com/site/juliancalaby/ -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-wireless" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
