Qualcomm Calls To 'Kill All Proprietary Drivers For Good' 195
An anonymous reader writes "Next week at the sixth Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, two Qualcomm Atheros engineers will be making a stand for killing all proprietary drivers for good — across all operating systems. The Qualcomm slides go over their early plans. Do they stand a chance?"
Re:Start with their GSM/CDMA/LTE basebands. (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, where's the damn Snapdragon datasheet?
And what's with the piles of binary blobs in handsets based on their hardware?
Oh, and the dual-licensing of the AR6000 WLAN driver that lets vendors like Samsung effectively release it as a proprietary module?
Re:Quick Answer (Score:4, Informative)
Half an hour? You're doing it wrong.
You can install Bodhi from a thumb drive in about 10 minutes. There's even a video floating around Youtube of somebody installing it in a virtual machine in less than 10 minutes, from first boot to working installed desktop. When I installed it on my Dell ultraportable, everything worked out of the box, no configuration needed. (though to be fair, the Dell came with Ubuntu preinstalled, so it's hardly surprising)
Ubuntu can be done just about as quickly, in my experience. As long as you have a reasonably fast optical drive or are installing from a good quality thumb drive.
Re:chance or no... (Score:5, Informative)
Really? I have almost all of their PCI/PCIe 802.11n hardware working, stable and supporting 802.11na/802.11ng. I fixed AR9280 support, fixed AR9285 support and added AR9287 support. Once 802.11n support is in the tree I'll move to tidying up the DMA and interrupt path and introduce the changes needed for AR93xx and later series NICs. I have working bluetooth coexistence patches that I haven't yet setup a test bed to validate and I have things stable now on both SMP and UP machines.
The only thing I've broken is TDMA.
A lot of those commits are because I've been (a) fixing issues as they've come up, and (b) I like doing small commits that make it easier to bisect changes.
I think I've done a pretty good job. I'm glad to take constructive criticism. The PR system is ----> That way. :)