Porting the OpenBSD free Atheros HAL

[Rob Deker]

Kris Kennaway wrote:

>On Mon, Nov 08, 2004 at 10:35:29AM -0500, Rob Deker wrote:
>  
>
>>Hi,
>>
>>I was just wondering if anybody was working on porting the new 
>>open-source Atheros HAL from OpenBSD to FreeBSD yet.
>>    
>>
>
>Why would you want to do this?  Doesn't it provide a subset of what
>the FreeBSD driver already provides?
>
>  
>
You're right, it does. However, myself and collegue recently presented 
our work in raw Atheros raw frame injection at ToorCon based on the 
Atheros HAL and Sam's driver/HAL wrapper. If you're familliar with these 
cards and their current status in the open-source world, you'll know 
that the only method of using them relies solely on the binary-only HAL 
provided by Atheros that Sam Leffler was kind enough to wrap in a 
FreeBSD driver shell. Given the nature of the work we've done to date, 
you might imagine that we were very interested to hear of a non-binary 
solution to communication with these wireless chipsets. Given that our 
current codebase is written against FreeBSD 5.2 and that the new 
alternative HAL is attempting to be interface compatible with the HAL 
from Sam/Atheros, it should be pretty close to a drop-in replacement. 
There will however be a minor porting effort required to bring it from 
OpenBSD, and we simply didn't want to duplicate any efforts that other 
parties may be undertaking.

So, as we mentioned before, if anybody is already doing this, or would 
like to work on it, we're offering any assistance we can provide. 
Otherwise, we're willing to tackle the problem ourselves, but it will 
likely take us a bit longer than others who are more familliar with the 
FreeBSD and OpenBSD kernels (our original driver work was our first 
foray into the FreeBSD kernel).

-d