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[20060302]
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Atheros ath* wlan now available for NetBSD/sparc64
The Atheros ath(4) driver is an interesting piece of software,
consisting of a .c glue file that calls into a binary blob object
file. While the interface to the blob is known, the internal
details of it are not, and the blob does all the talking to
the actual hardware. To port the ath(4) driver to a new platform,
a compiled version of that binary blog is necessary, obviously.
Also, some adjusting is needed to adjust the C interface file
to existing blobs to maintain compatibility with the operating
systems' interface.
Now, Martin Husemann has fixed up the glue layer to work on
NetBSD/sparc64, see
his mail
for more details.
(Some people may wonder now why all that fuzz is needed: Atheros
doesn't make the sources of the binary blob available for a number
of reasons; while an open source driver would definitely be nice to
have, living in a world of patents and FCC regulations requires
being flexible)
[Tags: ath, sparc64]
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