Broadcom releases an open-source driver for its wireless chipsets • Hacker News Board

Re: Broadcom releases an open-source driver for its wireless chipsets

#11

Post by wmf » Thu, Sep 09, 2010, 8:04 PM UTC

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #9

I struggled with vendor drivers for chipsets for years (yes this company too). They are generally awful. Most are warmed-over demo drivers from the original silicon vendor, intended to exercise chip features but no diligence to adhere to specs, protocols, handle (any) error conditions, be readable or supportable. Vendor "support" for their driver means a third-string intern/student who hashes together patches that re…

I agree completely with what you said (e.g. the BCM5700 driver was rewritten as tg3), but in this case it's much better to have a crappy vendor driver than to have nothing from the vendor, which was the situation yesterday.

Re: Broadcom releases an open-source driver for its wireless chipsets

#12

Post by jallmann » Thu, Sep 09, 2010, 8:25 PM UTC

Great to see this. Broadcom also came out with drivers for its CrystalHD decoder chip a while ago (http://www.broadcom.com/support/crystal_hd/) and they are actively involved in community development of the driver (http://groups.google.com/group/crystalhd-development)

Re: Broadcom releases an open-source driver for its wireless chipsets

#13

Post by dfox » Thu, Sep 09, 2010, 9:14 PM UTC

yason wrote: post #4

Zak wrote: post #3

I don't understand why more commodity hardware companies aren't doing this. Drivers are an actual competitive advantage with 3D video cards and possibly a few other things, but I can't see it for wireless chipsets. It seems to me that making the drivers open source might actually reduce costs, with no real down sides.

3D video cards are a commodity, too, these days. Even they could offer open-source reference drivers that allow for full basic utilization of the hardware, albeit at suboptimal performance. The heavily-optimized trade secret like cool codepaths could be offered in binary drivers for those who want the last drop of perf.

The business problem of open source 3D drivers lies not so much in secret know-how in the drivers but in this: http://steveblank.com/2009/04/16/supermac-war-story-7-buildi... High-end graphics cards tend to be exactly same as consumer level cards, save for few bits in some configuration memory that is used by driver to disable more advanced features/reduce performance.

Re: Broadcom releases an open-source driver for its wireless chipsets

#14

Post by acqq » Thu, Sep 09, 2010, 9:47 PM UTC

Congratulations Broadcom! It's nice to see you becoming a Linux-friendly company! It's certainly a new chapter in the history of the company!

(People who use Linux and your chipsets already know why this is such a good news.)

Re: Broadcom releases an open-source driver for its wireless chipsets

#15

Post by jey » Thu, Sep 09, 2010, 10:18 PM UTC

I'm looking at the source and the code that interfaces with the PHY has had every single comment stripped out of it. I don't see the point of that, it'll just take a bit longer for the code to be understood... after all, these guys have even black-box reverse-engineered many NICs.

Re: Broadcom releases an open-source driver for its wireless chipsets

#16

Post by woodall » Thu, Sep 09, 2010, 10:50 PM UTC

jey wrote: post #15

I'm looking at the source and the code that interfaces with the PHY has had every single comment stripped out of it. I don't see the point of that, it'll just take a bit longer for the code to be understood... after all, these guys have even black-box reverse-engineered many NICs.

For those who didn't know

"black box" reverse engineering - systems are observed without examining internal structure.

"white box" reverse engineering - the inner workings of the system are inspected.

http://www.chillingeffects.org/reverse/faq.cgi#QID188

http://multimedia.cx/eggs/black-box-re/

Re: Broadcom releases an open-source driver for its wireless chipsets

#17

Post by woodall » Thu, Sep 09, 2010, 10:52 PM UTC

Zak wrote: post #3

I don't understand why more commodity hardware companies aren't doing this. Drivers are an actual competitive advantage with 3D video cards and possibly a few other things, but I can't see it for wireless chipsets. It seems to me that making the drivers open source might actually reduce costs, with no real down sides.

Drivers are IP. When a company goes tits that usually the last asset to be sold.

Re: Broadcom releases an open-source driver for its wireless chipsets

#18

Post by cdavid » Thu, Sep 09, 2010, 10:59 PM UTC

dfox wrote: post #13

yason wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3D video cards are a commodity, too, these days. Even they could offer open-source reference drivers that allow for full basic utilization of the hardware, albeit at suboptimal performance. The heavily-optimized trade secret like cool codepaths could be offered in binary drivers for those who want the last drop of perf.

The business problem of open source 3D drivers lies not so much in secret know-how in the drivers but in this: http://steveblank.com/2009/04/16/supermac-war-story-7-buildi... High-end graphics cards tend to be exactly same as consumer level cards, save for few bits in some configuration memory that is used by driver to disable more advanced features/reduce performance.

Is this relevant to the current 3d cards market ? I somehow doubt it.

Re: Broadcom releases an open-source driver for its wireless chipsets

#19

Post by sliverstorm » Thu, Sep 09, 2010, 11:28 PM UTC

cdavid wrote: post #18

dfox wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The business problem of open source 3D drivers lies not so much in secret know-how in the drivers but in this: http://steveblank.com/2009/04/16/supermac-war-story-7-buildi... High-end graphics cards tend to be exactly same as consumer level cards, save for few bits in some configuration memory that is used by driver to disable more advanced features/reduce performance.

Is this relevant to the current 3d cards market ? I somehow doubt it.

They typically laser-cut traces etc nowadays.

Re: Broadcom releases an open-source driver for its wireless chipsets

#20

Post by wmf » Thu, Sep 09, 2010, 11:39 PM UTC

cdavid wrote: post #18

dfox wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The business problem of open source 3D drivers lies not so much in secret know-how in the drivers but in this: http://steveblank.com/2009/04/16/supermac-war-story-7-buildi... High-end graphics cards tend to be exactly same as consumer level cards, save for few bits in some configuration memory that is used by driver to disable more advanced features/reduce performance.

Is this relevant to the current 3d cards market ? I somehow doubt it.

It is relevant; people are "softmodding" GeForces into Quadros, theoretically costing Nvidia millions in revenue. Open-source drivers might make this even easier.