On Sat, 2010-11-20 at 11:29 +1100, Julian Calaby wrote: > 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 ) I've sent a mail to a contact at Marvell, we'll see where it goes. I'm hopeful given that Marvell has generally been pretty good with firmware licensing in the past. I'd have already pushed firmware from their Extranet for the 8335, but all I have access to are Vista drivers. I did try to extract STA firmware from the Vista drivers about 2 years ago, but the resulting firmware failed to work correctly with mwl8k so I gave up on it. Plus I'd much rather have the duplex firmware from the MSSII sources instead of STA-only. Dan > 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, > -- 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
