[Prism54-devel] Prism54 development update

[Maximilian Engelhardt]

On Mi, 2005-08-31 at 14:37 +0200, Sebastien wrote:
> Hello list !
> 
> First, Jean Baptiste and I are working on low-level hardware reverse 
> engineering, in order to write a new firmware from scratch. The project is 
> named "FreeMAC" [...]

This are really good news. Removing the need to upload a non-open-source
firmware and making the device work with whatever WLAN will bring in the
future (well, as long at it's not prevented by some hardware
limitations :) will make the driver much easier for users and will give
them much more possibilities. 

But there's one thing I think should be discussed at the beginning.

The preferred way of writing drivers by reverse engineering has always
been to have two independent groups. One doing the reverse engineering
work and writing documentation about the device and the other writing a
driver for the device by the documentation from the first group. This is
called the clean room design [1] and it's used to avoid getting
proprietary code from the vendor into the driver.
I found this on the netdev ML where someone is reverse engineering the
madwifi hal. There was a small discussion [2] about this issue, but
AFAIK there hasn't been any decision yet.

I don't want to you to stop anything you want to do, I just want you to
think about this and discuss it in an early stat.

Now good luck reverse engineering and of course I'll help you when I
have time and as far as I can.

Maxi

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design
[2] http://www.mail-archive.com/netdev@vger.kernel.org/msg01122.html
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