On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 12:59 PM, Garrett D'Amore <gdamore at opensolaris.org> wrote: > Shawn Walker wrote: > > On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 10:39 AM, Darren Kenny <Darren.Kenny at sun.com> > wrote: > > > >> I have now got a Broadcom wireless card, rather than Atheros, and the > Marvel NIC > >> seems to be slightly different too. > >> > > > > Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. > > > > I would return it or replace the broadcom with Atheros post-haste. > > > > Until Sun negotiates a decent agreement with Broadcom, or Broadcom has > > a change of heart (unlikely), wireless w/ broadcom is "hell on earth." > > > > The problem here isn't Sun, most assuredly. I can tell you from past > experience that Broadcom has *no* interest in yielding up any details > that would enable anyone else to work on their wifi parts, even under > full NDA. The only way you'll get any support from Broadcom on this is > if you can show that it will increase their unit-sales by at least about > 1M units, in which case they might task an engineer to develop a > closed-source driver for (Open)Solaris.
I wasn't aware of that Garret. ATi was the same way at one point with their R300 series (and newer) of parts. They wouldn't supply information, even under NDA, to developers. Thankfully, ATi turned around, I can only hope one day Broadacom will do the same. I have a Dell Laptop at home that I ended up buying a PCMCIA Atheros card for because of this. > The few thousand (or even tens-of-thousands) of us with these parts on > laptops that we want to use with OpenSolaris are just not an interesting > enough market for Broadcom. Yeah :( Thanks Garret. -- Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/ "To err is human -- and to blame it on a computer is even more so." - Robert Orben
