Alexandre Oliva wrote: > On Jan 2, 2009, Larry Finger <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Alexandre Oliva wrote: > >>> Any news on this front? > >>> Thanks in advance. Looking forward to a positive response from you all. > >> I'm not sure what you want. > > You mentioned you were getting in touch with Realtek to get their input > on this device. I was wondering how cooperative they were. > > Other than that, I'm trying to decide whether those bits can be > considered Free Software (i.e., none of the 4 essential freedoms can be > substantially denied), before I include it in Linux-libre.
The Realtek engineers were quite helpful, even though the company has not placed their driver on the web site. I don't know the reasons for that decision. >> We took the Realtek Linux driver and put the difference between that >> driver and the RTL8187 device into the Linux driver. > > Right. That's why I'm following up with your upstream, to figure out > how it got there, and whether we can get enough information to set it > apart from 'black magic' and make it possible for a user to adapt it to > suit her own needs. > >> That code was incorporated into kernel 2.6.27. The are ongoing >> improvements, but the driver works very well. > > I've had trouble suspending one of my notebooks with an rtl8187b WiFi > interface, but I haven't investigated whether that's a consequence of > the removal of those bits. I know some people are working with Lemote > to try to address this same problem on their 100% Free laptops. We'll > see. There is a Bugzilla on that problem with the Linux mainline driver and I just discovered that if I rmmod/insmod the driver, then it generates a mac80211 warning. OTOH, if I rmmod then unplug/replug, everything is OK. As suspend/resume does a driver unload/reload, I suspect the two problems are related. Larry _______________________________________________ linux-libre mailing list [email protected] http://www.fsfla.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/linux-libre
