When you first came to Linux you may have been blessed with a perfectly supported, flawlessly working Wi-Fi dongle from the get go. Sadly many more weren’t. This was down, in part, to the prevalence of several hardware companies who provided the ‘chipset’s for these Wi-Fi dongles, Linux support was non-existent.
This lead to many ‘would-be’ Linux users fast becoming ‘would-be’ rather doing something else…
Broadcom – one of the notorious aforementioned companies – today announced the release of a fully-open source Linux driver for their latest generation of .11n chipsets.
This is amazing.
From the perspective of an end user whose own trials with Wi-Fi in Ubuntu several years back were hampered by one of these blasted Broadcom chipsets, I am really pleased to see some official recognition from Broadcom towards Linux users.
Applause must also surely go to the nerds and nerdettes who have toiled away on the open-source drivers so many of us use today – despite having had next-to-no documentation to work from whatsoever.
Back to Broadcom who had this to say in their announcement to the Linux-Wireless mailing list : –
The driver, while still a work in progress, is released as full source and uses the native mac80211 stack. It supports multiple current chips (BCM4313, BCM43224, BCM43225) as well as providing a framework for supporting additional chips in the future, including mac80211-aware embedded chips.
The driver is currently available in staging-next git tree, available at:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/gregkh/staging-next-2.6.git
in the drivers/staging/brcm80211 directory.
Via | Phoronix