We have ath, now what about Broadcom?

Brooks Davis brooks at one-eyed-alien.net
Wed Jul 23 15:33:52 PDT 2003


On Wed, Jul 23, 2003 at 06:21:23PM -0400, Matthew Emmerton wrote:
> Why would Broadcom be scared?  Obviously it's the _driver_ that controls the
> power/freq output of the chip, so the responsibility of staying within FCC
> regs is that of the driver authors.  Of course, the "no warranty" aspects of
> open source drivers turns a blind eye to liability, but would things really
> come back to Broadcom?

It's not sufficent for a manufacture of RF equipment to say "don't do
that".  They have to take real, more or less working steps to keep you
from doing things you aren't supposed to do.  This is why the Linksys
link boosters were pulled.  FWIW, there is a solution to this which Sam
used to when implementing ath(4).  That is to implement a binary-only
hardware access layer, ath_hal(4), that keeps you from doing things you
aren't supposed to with the highly programable chips.

-- Brooks

-- 
Any statement of the form "X is the one, true Y" is FALSE.
PGP fingerprint 655D 519C 26A7 82E7 2529  9BF0 5D8E 8BE9 F238 1AD4
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/attachments/20030723/c8673f96/attachment.bin


More information about the freebsd-current mailing list