OT: Atheros releases free Linux driver for Its 802.11n Devices

[John W. Linville]

On Sun, Jul 27, 2008 at 04:25:55PM -0700, Antonio Olivares wrote:

> I have read some good news(I hope), that Atheros will be releasing
> some new drivers for Atheros based wireless.  I hope that it will be
> better than the ath5k which was ported from OpenBSD and then fixed!
> How soon can we see this new driver in Fedora?

I'll try not to sound snarky...

Previously I would have said you could expect ath9k in Fedora nearly
as soon as it is upstream, so nearly immediately.  Unfortunately,
a combination of unfortunate bugs and questionable changes to
how Fedora kernels were being released (automatic release after
just +3 in Bodhi?!?!?) caused that practice to become untenable.
So I agreed to slow-down the flow of wireless patches into Fedora.
FWIW I think the kernel release process has been changed a bit for
the better in the mean time, but the agreement to slow the wireless
patches remains in place.

With that in mind, the earlies you will see ath9k in Fedora is
most likely F10.  Rawhide users will probably see it a bit sooner
of course.  Those desperate to see it a bit sooner should investigate
the compat-wireless project, although it may have problems working
with current Fedora kernels -- what a mess...

Hth!

John
-- 
John W. Linville
linville at redhat.com