Difficulties with Atheros chipsets, especially in notebooks, in various flavors of Linux, are well known. Up till now, a couple of methods were available to get the chipsets working, usually involving a ‘wrapper’ to allow communication.

Now it has been announced by the Software Freedom Law Center that independent work on an OpenHAL is possible. This is an abstraction layer, which will allow Open Source software to speak directly to the chipset.

The work on the project was started by the developers at Open BSD, and was met with a challenge by Atheros to assure that the proprietary drivers were not being copied in any way. OpenBSD developers asked the SFLC to investigate the claims, and has given the go ahead for the layer, after auditing the two code bases. This step means that there should be no questions of copyright infringement, and the Open Source community can proceed at full speed.

Soon, all forms of 802.11 communication, including the N revision, will be working in all flavors of Linux and BSD operating systems, and millions of users will be happy. Many manufacturers, including Hewlitt Packard, Lenovo, and Toshiba use these chipsets.

This should also make for many more converts to Linux, as one of the last stumbling blocks to adoption will be gone.

More here.

[tags]Linux OpenBSD, WiFi, Atheros chipset, SFLC, OpenHAL[/tags]