HAL must die!

[Chad Perrin]

On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 08:27:32PM -0400, Daniel Staal wrote:
> 
> The additional knowledge that Linux supports them means the manufacturer 
> isn't totally closed to supporting Open-source software, but tells us 
> nothing beyond that.  Linux's support may be by way of a binary blob from 
> Linksys, which doesn't help FreeBSD at all.  The cards would still need to 
> be reverse-engineered from scratch.

It doesn't even tell us that much.  It may be that someone decided to
spend an incredible amount of time and energy reverse-engineering the
hardware interface for the device and the driver software used on another
OS, then built a driver that has for some reason (probably licensing)
presented enough of a challenge to incorporation into a BSD Unix system
that building something similarly for FreeBSD has proved challenging (to
put it kindly).


> 
> If the manufacturer releases some technical documents on how to talk to the 
> cards, that's a start at helping people write drivers.  Even if they do 
> nothing else.
> 
> But chewing out Chad because he makes the guess that two cards he knows 
> nothing about are not supported because the manufacturer hasn't supplied 
> the support to make them supported (which they probably have on at least 
> Windows, if not Linux as well) is just blaming him for not being able to 
> read your mind about hardware you have in hand.

Thanks.

-- 
Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]
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