Posts Tagged ‘madwifi’

HAL for MadWifi on a open license

Wednesday, December 17th, 2008

madwifi-logo-20081106-2

Sam Leffler, maintainer of the binary HAL that is also used in MadWifi releases, has released the source code for his HAL variant under ISC license. It is available through a Subversion repository (web interface), which is also be used actively for development and further improvements.

In his announcement, Sam states:

Coincident with the release of this code I have concluded my agreement with Atheros whereby I had access to information about their devices. This means that in the future all fixes, updates for new chips, etc. will need to be a community effort. Atheros states the Linux platform will be the reference public code base so folks wanting to add support for other platforms will have to scrape the information from there.

“Linux platform” refers to ath5k and ath9k. Interested parties are advised to attend the ath5k-devel and ath9k-devel mailing lists. These lists may be also used to ask general questions about the chipsets supported by the respective drivers.

For Linux developers this means further access to documentation to help enhance drivers like ath5k in particular for the AR5210 and AR5211 family of chipsets. For the FreeBSD and NetBSD family this means a drop in open replacement for the binary HAL which was being used.

Source: http://madwifi-project.org/wiki/news/20081129/sam-leffler-releases-hal-source

New HAL release for Atheros Hardware

Wednesday, September 17th, 2008

madwifi logo

madwifi logo

We would like to announce the release of a new HAL for Atheros WLAN devices. The new HAL is the result of a collaboration between OpenWrt.org, DD-WRT and MakSat Technologies (P) Ltd. It is the first result of a common effort, and the present collaborators would like to share the product of this work. It is their intention to provide reliable and continued support for other projects using this new HAL for Atheros WLAN devices.

The HAL provides a defined API to access and control Atheros WLAN chipsets, and is an integral part for many drivers such as MadWifi. Comparing it with the HAL that’s currently used by MadWifi, the most important changes are:

  • many known bugs have been fixed
  • improved noise immunity measures
  • added support for additional architectures, such as ARM11, MIPS64 and MIPS32r2
  • enhanced support for Atheros WiSOC (Wireless System on Chip)
  • added support for Atheros AR7100

Home of the new HAL will be the website of the madwifi.org project. Future development will be coordinated here, and the bug tracking facility can be used to report bugs or file feature requests.

For commercial requests please contact hal@maksat.de.

The following is a list of links to involved projects and/or already available vendor solutions using the new HAL for Atheros WLAN devices:

  • OpenWrt.org – embedded linux distribution and development environment
  • DD-WRT.com – professional and end user firmwares for common wireless routers and boards
  • Maksat Product Line – offers tough hardware and special software enhancements for all areas and very inexpensive small APs

For more info of features and suported hardware madwifi.org