Re: Too Evil, Too Furious

>>>>> On Tue, 26 Apr 2005 07:15:57 +0000 (GMT), 
>>>>> wpaul_at_FreeBSD.ORG (Bill Paul) said:

 >> >>>>> On Mon, 25 Apr 2005 17:15:28 +0000 (GMT), 
 >> >>>>> wpaul_at_freebsd.org (Bill Paul) said:
 >> 
 >> > - RayLink RT2500 wireless -- this one shows up on some PCI cards, but
 >> >   I haven't had any luck finding one locally yet
 >> 
 >> I assume that you mean RaLink (no "y").  Have you tried contacting the
 >> people at RaLink?  I understand that they are very supportive of open
 >> source development.  As a result, there is a Linux driver for both the
 >> rt2400 and rt2500.

 > If they were really supportive of open source, there would be manuals
 > for the RT2400 and RT2500 chipsets on their website that people could
 > download. ...

Well, yes that would be ideal.  However, it's worth asking them for
the manuals, don't you think?

 > "But Linux support means open source support, right?" 

Of course not.  I didn't say any such thing.

 > No, it just means Linux support. 

I know.

 > I'm sure the marketing people would like you to think
 > the two things are equal, but they really aren't.

I neither know nor care what the marketing people would like me to
believe.  As you know, it has become relatively common for vendors to
make binary drivers available for Linux.  However, in RaLink's case
they GPLed the source for their driver.  This is not so common and
leads me to believe that it is at least worth asking them for manuals.
The project developers for the Linux rt2400/rt2500 driver are Ivo van
Doorn <ivd_at_euronet.nl>, Luis Correia <lfcorreia_at_users.sf.net>, and
Mark Wallis <mwallis_at_serialmonkey.com>.  If having the manuals would
be helpful for Project Evil, then perhaps, they could put you in
contact the relevant person at RaLink.

 > "But you can easily port the Linux driver, right?" 

Would you please stop trying to putting words in my mouth.  I know
that this is neither trivial, nor the best way to go about writing a
driver. 

 > You've just provided a perfect example of model number confusion. Your
 > Belkin F5D7010 card has a RaLink chipset. But Belkin has another card
 > also called the F5D7010 which has a Broadcom chipset. I found a Belkin
 > F5D7010 card at CompUSA this past weekend, but I couldn't buy it since
 > there was no way to tell which revision it was, and I didn't want to
 > end up with yet another Broadcom cardbus card.

I came across http://ralink.rapla.net/, which lists all cards with the
rt2500 chipset.  It looks like the F5D7010 vers. 2 has the rt2500,
whereas presumably vers. 1 uses the Broadcom chipset.  My card has
vers. 3 on it, which isn't listed in the table.  It seems that they
stuck with the rt2500 for vers. 3.  I agree with you that hardware
manufacturers should do a complete model number change when they
change chipsets, rather than just update the rev. number.

 > Right now my goal is to make Project Evil support the NDIS spec as
 > well as possible, and for that I need to test as many NDIS drivers as
 > possible.

 > If someone else wants to create a native driver, then more power to
 > them. I've written more than enough drivers for one lifetime.

I know.

[szamoca:38] grep "Bill Paul" /usr/src/sys/pci/* | wc -l
     112
[szamoca:39] 

Thanks, by the way.

Sandy