News Archive

October 10, 2007

Linux 2.6.23 was released today. On the wireless front, a variety of fixes and improvements were contributed all over the place. The biggest news items are the inclusion of the rtl8187 driver, which supports USB devices based on the RTL8187 chipset, and zd1211rw enhancements to support devices based on the Atheros AR5007UG USB chipset.

September 27, 2007

The Software Freedom Law Center has published a new statement which as per MadWifi's press release:

  • "... this should once and for all clear up any doubts about licensing practices we have used and details of provenance of code since the project's start all the way down to our current ath5k driver code.".

Additionally, the press release states that

  • "The audit confirms that fixes and improvements to work derived from OpenBSD's ar5k - specifically what is in the wireless-legacy repository now - can safely be contributed back."

As per the advice from SFLC new guidelines have been posted about about sending patches for Linux-wireless. To help keep track of changes under permissive licenses a new ''Changes-licensed-under'' tag is being introduced. Additionally we would like to request developers to subscribe to the guidelines page for submitting patches to receive diffs of changes to this guide so we're all on the same page.

July 31, 2007

The Software Freedom Law Center has published a statement clearing legal uncertainty of the reverse-engineered OpenHAL code used to drive Atheros PCI hardware. This is a significant step in the journey to support Atheros PCI wireless hardware in mainline Linux. Read the full statement here.

July 8, 2007

Linux 2.6.22, released today, features the initial inclusion of mac80211, the upcoming unified Linux wireless stack which will be shared between a number of drivers. No drivers in this kernel release use mac80211, but existing drivers will be ported and new drivers will be added later.

Alongside the usual rounds of driver updates and fixes, the Marvell Libertas 8388 USB-wireless driver was added, which drives the hardware in the OLPC laptop.

July 6, 2007

The Software Freedom Law Center has released a white paper detailing the implications of the FCC's new Software Defined Radio (SDR) classification on free/open source wireless drivers. This is certainly a step in the right direction, although the FCC's position regarding free/open code remains "more conservative than is necessary". Read the full white paper.

April 17, 2007

We're featured on enterprise networking planet: http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/nethub/article.php/3672491.

February 9, 2007

Intel launches a new site dedicated to their Linux wireless projects – intellinuxwireless.org. From their site, "Here you can learn about and download the latest development versions of the Linux-based wireless drivers for Intel adapters."

?, 2008

Linux 2.6.26 is released. With almost 600 changesets related to wireless, this release brings you lots more wireless goodies:

  • mac80211 now supports draft mesh networking (802.11s; thanks to the open80211s project)

  • zd1211rw supports mesh networking (b43 will follow in 2.6.27, hopefully more drivers later)

  • mac80211 now supports more optional HT (802.11n) features
  • mac80211's monitor interfaces can now be configured more precisely, "cooked" monitors were added
  • mac80211's IBSS implementation now supports IBSS merging and received various bugfixes

  • mac80211 now has an in-kernel documentation book, help welcome!

  • b43 now has support for PCMCIA devices and QoS/WME

Also, lots of removals this time:

  • the bcm43xx driver
  • the old ieee80211softmac code

Access point mode has received a lot of attention in the stack and drivers, but is not ready yet.

Finally, lots of internal API updates and fixes.