Open Source HAL for Atheros WLAN Chipsets
Developer Sam Leffler has released the HAL code of the WiFi drivers for Atheros chipsets as open source.
The Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) was until recently the only proprietary, exclusively binary component of the Madwifi driver for WLAN cards with Atheros chips. The drivers themselves are dually licensed under BSD and GPLv2.
Leffler has now published the code under the Open Source ISC license, while simultaneously ending his agreement with Atheros, who supplied the developer with hardware information. In future, his realization of HAL will serve as a reference implementation.
The code is available in the Subversion Archive of the the freeBSD Project. It can be applied to both Linux ATH5K and ATH9K. Interested developers can gain more information on the ath5k-devel and ath9K-devel mailing lists.