5 ms·

Broadcom releases an open-source driver for its wireless chipsets

82 points by goplexian 16y ago

Zak 16y ago
I don't understand why more commodity hardware companies aren't doing this. Drivers are an actual competitive advantage with 3D video cards and possibly a few other things, but I can't see it for wireless chipsets. It seems to me that making the drivers open source might actually reduce costs, with no real down sides.
- yason 16y ago
  3D video cards are a commodity, too, these days. Even they could offer open-source reference drivers that allow for full basic utilization of the hardware, albeit at suboptimal performance. The heavily-optimized trade secret like cool codepaths could be offered in binary drivers for those who want the last drop of perf.
  - Zak 16y ago
    As I understand it, ATI is almost doing that by providing information to authors of open-source drivers.
  - dfox 16y ago
    The business problem of open source 3D drivers lies not so much in secret know-how in the drivers but in this: http://steveblank.com/2009/04/16/supermac-war-story-7-building-the-whole-product/ http://steveblank.com/2009/04/16/supermac-war-story-7-buildi... High-end graphics cards tend to be exactly same as consumer level cards, save for few bits in some configuration memory that is used by driver to disable more advanced features/reduce performance.
    - cdavid 16y ago
      Is this relevant to the current 3d cards market ? I somehow doubt it.
      - sliverstorm 16y ago
        They typically laser-cut traces etc nowadays.
      - wmf 16y ago
        It is relevant; people are "softmodding" GeForces into Quadros, theoretically costing Nvidia millions in revenue. Open-source drivers might make this even easier.
        ciupicri 16y ago
        Do you have more details about this? Maybe a link or something.
        wmf 16y ago
        http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=geforce+softmodding http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=geforce+softmodding
      - forgottenpaswrd 16y ago
        It is. Making a new chip is very very expensive, but copying it is cheap. People demand millions of low end systems but only thousands of high end. What companies do is use mass production for lowering the price not only of their low-end chips but high end too. They just disable and don't test the "advanced features" in low end cards. With drivers you could enable it. Some blocks could be damaged(as it was not tested) but as a much lower price you just can buy new cheap ones.
- woodall 16y ago
  Drivers are IP. When a company goes tits that usually the last asset to be sold.
morisy 16y ago
I feel like there has got to be a gotcha or two in there, but if not, this is great news. I wonder how much the proliferating netbook market is to blame for it?
- joezydeco 16y ago
  Wanna bet it's so they don't get left behind in the ChromeOS reference designs?
  - kelnos 16y ago
    I hear Google's been putting pressure on manufacturers to avoid using binary blobs in the kernel on Android. This could be related to that as well.
lenni 16y ago
From the comments: "Has hell frozen over?"
konad 16y ago
Great and all but "Linux drivers are not documentation"! All of FOSS is not Linux.
- sparky 16y ago
  I agree with you, but if I had to choose between a functional Linux driver and documentation, even as someone running BSD, I would take the Linux driver every time. A functional driver with source lends some confidence that nothing is missing. Documentation can be well-intentioned, but it is rarely so complete that you could write a major piece of software with nothing else. Of course, drivers+documentation would be even better :)
- samstokes 16y ago
  I'm not a driver author, but I'd hazard a guess that the source for a Linux driver is a lot easier to port to BSD than the binary.
JoeAltmaier 16y ago
I struggled with vendor drivers for chipsets for years (yes this company too). They are generally awful. Most are warmed-over demo drivers from the original silicon vendor, intended to exercise chip features but no diligence to adhere to specs, protocols, handle (any) error conditions, be readable or supportable. Vendor "support" for their driver means a third-string intern/student who hashes together patches that reveal profound ignorance of the architecture. Its not just NIH; the chain of custody from silicon designer to you just doesn't include ANYBODY who has your interests/your customer's interests in mind. They are more concerned with making the driver portable across their product line, doing it cheaply, getting it to market at the same time their hardware releases etc. Any robustness/architecture/responsible software processes have to be your business and yours alone. This probably means rewriting the whole driver, using the demo driver for reference but ONLY for chip-specific info.
- wmf 16y ago
  I agree completely with what you said (e.g. the BCM5700 driver was rewritten as tg3), but in this case it's much better to have a crappy vendor driver than to have nothing from the vendor, which was the situation yesterday.
zacharycohn 16y ago
Well I'll be hit in the face with a tire iron. Didn't see this one coming. Now if only this happened two years ago, I'd have been running linux for two years.
jallmann 16y ago
Great to see this. Broadcom also came out with drivers for its CrystalHD decoder chip a while ago (http://www.broadcom.com/support/crystal_hd/ http://www.broadcom.com/support/crystal_hd/) and they are actively involved in community development of the driver (http://groups.google.com/group/crystalhd-development http://groups.google.com/group/crystalhd-development)
acqq 16y ago
Congratulations Broadcom! It's nice to see you becoming a Linux-friendly company! It's certainly a new chapter in the history of the company! (People who use Linux and your chipsets already know why this is such a good news.)
jey 16y ago
I'm looking at the source and the code that interfaces with the PHY has had every single comment stripped out of it. I don't see the point of that, it'll just take a bit longer for the code to be understood... after all, these guys have even black-box reverse-engineered many NICs.
- woodall 16y ago
  For those who didn't know "black box" reverse engineering - systems are observed without examining internal structure. "white box" reverse engineering - the inner workings of the system are inspected. http://www.chillingeffects.org/reverse/faq.cgi#QID188 http://www.chillingeffects.org/reverse/faq.cgi#QID188 http://multimedia.cx/eggs/black-box-re/ http://multimedia.cx/eggs/black-box-re/
GeneralMaximus 16y ago
This is good news for operating systems besides Linux, too. I might be able to run Haiku on my laptop now :)
kelnos 16y ago
Unfortunately, it looks like the new driver only supports 3 chipsets, and none of the "older" SSB-based ones. Granted, it's a new driver, and they say it's designed with the idea that other chipsets can be added, but it's still a little disappointing. (I say "older," because my BCM4322 is such a chipset, and it's in my 15-month-old MacBook Pro. How is that "old?") Regardless, whatever their motivations, it's a nice start. I wonder if they plan to collaborate with the guys working on the b43 driver at all. They support a ton of chipsets, and (at least from my perspective) the main deficiency is the not-yet-finished (partly due to the reverse-engineering effort being incomplete) N-PHY support for the 11n chipsets.

82 points by goplexian 16y ago

Zak 16y ago

I don't understand why more commodity hardware companies aren't doing this. Drivers are an actual competitive advantage with 3D video cards and possibly a few other things, but I can't see it for wireless chipsets. It seems to me that making the drivers open source might actually reduce costs, with no real down sides.

yason 16y ago
3D video cards are a commodity, too, these days. Even they could offer open-source reference drivers that allow for full basic utilization of the hardware, albeit at suboptimal performance. The heavily-optimized trade secret like cool codepaths could be offered in binary drivers for those who want the last drop of perf.
- Zak 16y ago
  As I understand it, ATI is almost doing that by providing information to authors of open-source drivers.
- dfox 16y ago
  The business problem of open source 3D drivers lies not so much in secret know-how in the drivers but in this: http://steveblank.com/2009/04/16/supermac-war-story-7-building-the-whole-product/ http://steveblank.com/2009/04/16/supermac-war-story-7-buildi... High-end graphics cards tend to be exactly same as consumer level cards, save for few bits in some configuration memory that is used by driver to disable more advanced features/reduce performance.
  - cdavid 16y ago
    Is this relevant to the current 3d cards market ? I somehow doubt it.
    - sliverstorm 16y ago
      They typically laser-cut traces etc nowadays.
    - wmf 16y ago
      It is relevant; people are "softmodding" GeForces into Quadros, theoretically costing Nvidia millions in revenue. Open-source drivers might make this even easier.
      - ciupicri 16y ago
        Do you have more details about this? Maybe a link or something.
        wmf 16y ago
        http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=geforce+softmodding http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=geforce+softmodding
    - forgottenpaswrd 16y ago
      It is. Making a new chip is very very expensive, but copying it is cheap. People demand millions of low end systems but only thousands of high end. What companies do is use mass production for lowering the price not only of their low-end chips but high end too. They just disable and don't test the "advanced features" in low end cards. With drivers you could enable it. Some blocks could be damaged(as it was not tested) but as a much lower price you just can buy new cheap ones.
woodall 16y ago
Drivers are IP. When a company goes tits that usually the last asset to be sold.

morisy 16y ago

I feel like there has got to be a gotcha or two in there, but if not, this is great news. I wonder how much the proliferating netbook market is to blame for it?

joezydeco 16y ago
Wanna bet it's so they don't get left behind in the ChromeOS reference designs?
- kelnos 16y ago
  I hear Google's been putting pressure on manufacturers to avoid using binary blobs in the kernel on Android. This could be related to that as well.

lenni 16y ago

From the comments: "Has hell frozen over?"

konad 16y ago

Great and all but "Linux drivers are not documentation"! All of FOSS is not Linux.

sparky 16y ago
I agree with you, but if I had to choose between a functional Linux driver and documentation, even as someone running BSD, I would take the Linux driver every time. A functional driver with source lends some confidence that nothing is missing. Documentation can be well-intentioned, but it is rarely so complete that you could write a major piece of software with nothing else. Of course, drivers+documentation would be even better :)
samstokes 16y ago
I'm not a driver author, but I'd hazard a guess that the source for a Linux driver is a lot easier to port to BSD than the binary.

JoeAltmaier 16y ago

I struggled with vendor drivers for chipsets for years (yes this company too). They are generally awful. Most are warmed-over demo drivers from the original silicon vendor, intended to exercise chip features but no diligence to adhere to specs, protocols, handle (any) error conditions, be readable or supportable. Vendor "support" for their driver means a third-string intern/student who hashes together patches that reveal profound ignorance of the architecture. Its not just NIH; the chain of custody from silicon designer to you just doesn't include ANYBODY who has your interests/your customer's interests in mind. They are more concerned with making the driver portable across their product line, doing it cheaply, getting it to market at the same time their hardware releases etc. Any robustness/architecture/responsible software processes have to be your business and yours alone. This probably means rewriting the whole driver, using the demo driver for reference but ONLY for chip-specific info.

wmf 16y ago
I agree completely with what you said (e.g. the BCM5700 driver was rewritten as tg3), but in this case it's much better to have a crappy vendor driver than to have nothing from the vendor, which was the situation yesterday.

zacharycohn 16y ago

Well I'll be hit in the face with a tire iron. Didn't see this one coming. Now if only this happened two years ago, I'd have been running linux for two years.

jallmann 16y ago

Great to see this. Broadcom also came out with drivers for its CrystalHD decoder chip a while ago (http://www.broadcom.com/support/crystal_hd/ http://www.broadcom.com/support/crystal_hd/) and they are actively involved in community development of the driver (http://groups.google.com/group/crystalhd-development http://groups.google.com/group/crystalhd-development)

acqq 16y ago

Congratulations Broadcom! It's nice to see you becoming a Linux-friendly company! It's certainly a new chapter in the history of the company! (People who use Linux and your chipsets already know why this is such a good news.)

jey 16y ago

I'm looking at the source and the code that interfaces with the PHY has had every single comment stripped out of it. I don't see the point of that, it'll just take a bit longer for the code to be understood... after all, these guys have even black-box reverse-engineered many NICs.

woodall 16y ago
For those who didn't know "black box" reverse engineering - systems are observed without examining internal structure. "white box" reverse engineering - the inner workings of the system are inspected. http://www.chillingeffects.org/reverse/faq.cgi#QID188 http://www.chillingeffects.org/reverse/faq.cgi#QID188 http://multimedia.cx/eggs/black-box-re/ http://multimedia.cx/eggs/black-box-re/

GeneralMaximus 16y ago

This is good news for operating systems besides Linux, too. I might be able to run Haiku on my laptop now :)

kelnos 16y ago

Unfortunately, it looks like the new driver only supports 3 chipsets, and none of the "older" SSB-based ones. Granted, it's a new driver, and they say it's designed with the idea that other chipsets can be added, but it's still a little disappointing. (I say "older," because my BCM4322 is such a chipset, and it's in my 15-month-old MacBook Pro. How is that "old?") Regardless, whatever their motivations, it's a nice start. I wonder if they plan to collaborate with the guys working on the b43 driver at all. They support a ton of chipsets, and (at least from my perspective) the main deficiency is the not-yet-finished (partly due to the reverse-engineering effort being incomplete) N-PHY support for the 11n chipsets.