On 08/25/2011 03:55 PM, Rafał Miłecki wrote:
2011/8/25 Henry Ptasinski<henryp@xxxxxxxxxxxx>:
With the latest series of cleanup patches merged in by Greg KH, I'd like to
once again propose moving brcm80211 out of staging and into mainline.
Henry: a simple question, please explain it to me, what brcmsmac does
provide that b43 doesn't?
brcmsmac doesn't support SSB and duplicates BCMA support (doesn't make
use of bcma module)
brmcsmac doesn't support older PHYs like G/LP
brmcsmac doesn't support recent HT-PHY
brmcsmac doesn't support AP or monitor mode
all of that is supported by b43
The one thing brcmsmac is better at, is support for 14e4:4727 card
(BCM4313). I've already started work on support of this card in b43,
hope to get it working soon.
You mostly just duplicate support for cards that are already supported by b43.
I am certainly looking forward to the answer to this question.
My %0.02 contribution: When brcmsmac (or its predecessor) first appeared, b43
supported none of the newest Broadcom hardware. Since then, Rafał has done a
super job of extending b43, and as he pointed out, the community driver is
arguably better than the one contributed by Broadcom.
I would like to see the Broadcom engineers concentrate on two things: (1) adding
their new devices to b43, and (2) try to get their lawyers to allow the
community to redistribute their firmware. It would also be nice if they opened
the wl source. I cannot imagine many secrets contained within. Those changes
would overcome a lot of the bad will that has been built up in the community.
There are many users that reject a particular model of computer merely because
it has a Broadcom device included.
Larry
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