On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 04:34:27PM +0100, carsten.ku...@arcor.de wrote: > Hello, > > are there any plans to support the Atheros AR9462 WLAN IC (aka AR5B22, aka > WB222)? In my case I'd like to use it in a Acer AO725 laptop. > > If not, might it be possible to port code from the ath9k driver (Linux) or > would that not be a feasible way?
It's technically possible since the ath9k driver is dual BSD/GPL. There is also FreeBSD's ath driver, and there is the Atheros HAL which was recently open sourced: https://github.com/qca/qcamain_open_hal_public Contrary to the others OpenBSD currently has a split between ath and athn drivers. I think it makes sense to maintain that. It has also been suggested to port FreeBSD's ath driver to OpenBSD. I don't believe that is less work than extending the existing athn driver, though. So far I've found extending athn quite hard, and I don't think having to deal with possible regressions for already supported hardware would make this any easier. And it's possible that FreeBSD's driver relies on features specific to FreeBSD's net80211 stack. I don't know how much of a hurdle that would be but I wouldn't expect it to be trivial. There is already existing code for some newer atheros chips in ar9003.c. However it is currently unused and doesn't work with an ar9485 I have lying around. I have some work in progress patches for that if you're interested but they don't make anything work yet. Are you asking because you're interested in hacking on this yourself? Because we really need people who would want to do that.
