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Comment by krasin | Hacker News Reader

>AFAIK the Atheros drivers are open

(as corrected by many people, the statement below is not true)

the author of the post you reply to says it's not the drivers closed (yes, there're WiFi chips with open source drivers), but the radio firmware that runs on the chip. There's no open radio firmware for WiFi, and that's a big issue.

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The firmware for many older Atheros chips is open source, but as far as I know they haven't yet released the source for any of their 802.11ac firmware. The availability of open firmware for the wifi chipsets is one of the main reasons that CeroWRT is still targeting a router model that's now out of production: the next big problem they want to tackle is wifi performance, and there's no point attempting that if you can't hack the whole wifi stack. CeroWRT is still primarily a research testbed, even though almost all of it is stable and ready to be integrated upstream (which is why it's not entirely crazy for a new project like this to be based on CeroWRT rather than upstream OpenWRT).

The problem here is most hardware seems to require blobs so instead of building software for old hardware that you can't buy new anymore why not just build an entirely new piece of hardware?

People wanting to use this will most likely have to buy hardware for that purpose might as well build it from the ground up.

I would certainly buy it and judging by the hype the WRT1900AC got before ending in complete failure a lot of people would be willing to buy the hardware for that end.

Some of the Atheros Wi-Fi firmwares are open: https://github.com/qca/open-ath9k-htc-firmware

Unfortunately ath9k_htc is mostly found in USB devices.

If you can point me towards some of the USB devices that have ath9k inside I'd be grateful - I seem to get ralink or realtek every time I buy one.

http://goo.gl/LEp8kK wikidevi list

Thanks for the pointer. I didn't know about this. That's very cool.

AFAIK Atheros radios are softmac which moves most of the work into the driver, which is open.

Complaining about "big issues" that no one has the resources/will to fix always sounds like martyrdom to me.

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