Date: Wed, 5 May 1999 20:28:13 -0400 (EDT) From: wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu (Bill Paul) To: karp@eecs.harvard.edu (Brad Karp) Cc: freebsd-mobile@freebsd.org, dfr@nlsystems.com Subject: Re: duplicate 802.11 drivers Message-ID: <199905060028.UAA13862@startide.ctr.columbia.edu> In-Reply-To: <199905060010.UAA25721@dominator.eecs.harvard.edu> from "Brad Karp" at May 5, 99 08:10:23 pm
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Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, Brad Karp had to walk into mine and say: > I was unaware of Bill Paul's work; I don't subscribe to -current, only > -mobile. No time to read both. I'm utterly despondent that I spent time > doing this port when a non-GPL'ed driver was already almost complete. My own > fault, I guess. Well, I probably should have said something too, but I'm also swamped with Real Work (tm) and other drivers (I also have another PCI 10/100 driver in the works, and both the PCI sample cards and the WaveLANs arrived on the same day; and then there's fixing bugs in existing drivers). > As Bill points out, he didn't use the GPL Linux driver as a starting point; > he only used it as a spec document for the programming interface of the > WaveLAN 802.11 card. He started writing from scratch, so his driver is not > GPL-encumbered. > > Bill also said of his driver vs. my own: > > > It's also much prettier to look at, if I do say so myself. :) > > I only want to point out that I believe Bill's comment refers mainly to the > ugliness of the HCF-Light code, which I did not write--I took it from the Linux > driver, which it in turn took from Lucent. Oh, yes: definitely. I certainly didn't mean to imply anything about your own code (I haven't even looked at it yet: I'm just on my way out of the office and will check it out when I get home). I apologize for the misunderstanding: it's the HCF code I was talking about. Given the appearance of the HCF Light, I shudder to think what the Hermes firmware source code looks like. > I didn't have time to write a driver from scratch. Starting from the HCF-Light > let me complete the port in under 4 days. But yes, that HCF-Light code is > monstrous. Code by my hand is not. :-) Indeed. :) Oh, incidentally, there's another Linux WaveLAN driver written by a commercial outfit called TriplePoint, Inc. on behalf of Lucent which uses the full HCF library, however it's supplied as object code only, and only for the x86 platform. Then again, FreeBSD's pccard support currently doesn't work anywhere except on the x86 either. Maybe that will change with the newbus stuff. -Bill -- ============================================================================= -Bill Paul (212) 854-6020 | System Manager, Master of Unix-Fu Work: wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu | Center for Telecommunications Research Home: wpaul@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu | Columbia University, New York City ============================================================================= "Mulder, toads just fell from the sky!" "I guess their parachutes didn't open." ============================================================================= To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-mobile" in the body of the message
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