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Old 6th April 2009
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jggimi jggimi is offline
More noise than signal
 
Join Date: May 2008
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There is another way to approach this, since there are so many different 802.11 drivers.

The developers seem to classify the vendors in three general categories, based on hardware docs and general openness for discussion. These are my rough categorizations:
  1. The best vendors have open documentation, and they'll even work with developers to solve issues when behavior doesn't match the docs.
  2. These vendors have limited documentation, which usually seems to go hand-in-hand with limited communication.
  3. These vendors do not release open documentation, and usually are generally atithetical to open source projects. These vendors either provide a BLOB driver for Linux/FreeBSD, or they provide documentation under NDA, or they remain entirely closed.
There's a color coded list of wireless drivers, available from a presentation Theo gave at OpenCON in 2006:

See http://openbsd.rt.fm/papers/opencon06-docs/index.html
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