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January 11th 2006 at 1:57 pm in A colleague pointed me to this page on Broadcom support on the Linux platform.
My laptop has that chipset and currently it’s only supported through NDISWRAPPER.
Like TI (see section 4.1), Broadcom quickly gained a reputation as being very unfriendly to Linux. It was known that Broadcom internally had a fully functional Linux driver, but it was unwilling to release it in any form (even binary), and was not answering call for chipset specifications. However, soon people realised that the Linksys WRT54G, a router/access point with a Broadcom chipset, was based on Linux. Linksys was made aware that, because Linux is GPL, they had to release the full source code of the WRT54G firmware, which they promptly did. This source code contained a binary Linux driver for the Broadcom chipset.
A team of people led by Brett Wooldridge, Joe Jezak and Johannes Berg started to reverse engineer this driver by disassembling it, like it was done for the TI driver (see section 4.1). They did not write directly a driver, they produced a set of documentation so that the driver development would be legally separate from the reverse engineering effort.
Funny how, probably Microsoft, seems to make these vendors keep everything Windows-Only™, but that it’s just a matter of time for things to get picked up.
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