I thought at first that the sources to the closed HAL binaries were being made available. In my opinion this would give ath developers a boost because the sources would give them more insight into how the chipset works and also because they wouldn't depend so much on new releases of the HAL binaries that might take a long time to come. If the code base is not the same, then I think things are not so simple. And they usually aren't :-) I am not suggesting to port ath5k from madwifi into Solaris because I think the HAL is in fact an advantage, and if ath5k has so many Linux kernel dependencies it will actually be harder to port. However, maybe it would be worth creating a new Solaris driver from scratch based on the released HAL sources (due to the advantages of working with HAL sources instead of closed binaries as I mentioned above). In case someone decides to create such a driver from scratch, please let me know. I would like to see and learn how a network driver is created from scratch.
-- Douglas -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
