Manufacturer documented wireless NIC's

[bobmc]

Patrick Bowen wrote:
> Could anyone tell me who the manufacturers are that support their
> chips with documentation available to FreeBSD for the writing of
> drivers, please. 
I have two computers with VIA 6102 for ethernet. One is a EPIA Mini-itx
and the
CD included has a FreeBSD driver.  One might expect  the VIA driver to be
better than the free offering from an engineering student but I can't
tell that
from looking at the code while not knowing the hardware.  You can get specs
from VIA by filling out a form and telling a good story.  But it seems
VIA thinks they are doing a favor.

The point of this little tale is to question what "support" means.  It
looks like you
can't ship the VIA driver with BSD because of restrictions in the
source.  I would
only call it support if the ViA product pages included BSD along with
Windows and
Linux already listed as compatible OSes.  And if they contributed
quality drivers
to the 'BSD distributions.  It would be beneficial for VIA and BSD.

Cheers,  -BobMc-