staging/wlan-ng firmware blob

[Luis R. Rodriguez]

On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 12:06 PM, Karl
Relton<karllinuxtest.relton at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-06-30 at 11:13 -0700, Luis R. Rodriguez wrote:
>> On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 5:56 AM, Karl
>> Relton<karllinuxtest.relton at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>> > On Mon, 2009-06-29 at 16:15 -0700, Luis R. Rodriguez wrote:
>> >> On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 11:49 AM, Karl
>> >> Relton<karllinuxtest.relton at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>> >> > Dear friends
>> >> >
>> >> > With the advent of 2.6.31 into Karmic, please be advised that the
>> >> > staging/wlan-ng driver (module prism2_usb.ko) used for prism2_usb cards
>> >> > can now load the card firmware blob direct from /lib/firmware using the
>> >> > normal kernel firmware mechanism (previously it required a special
>> >> > userspace program to squirt the firmware at it).
>> >> >
>> >> > The driver will load prism2_ru.hex if present in /lib/firmware.
>> >> >
>> >> > Therefore can we upgrade the Ubuntu linux-firmware package to include
>> >> > this file?
>> >>
>> >> Patches to the linux-firmware should be sent to David Woodhouse. Since
>> >> this is upstream drivers/staging it should be welcomed.
>> >>
>> >
>> > Yes indeed. I have emailed David a couple of times over the past few
>> > weeks, but haven't had any response at all. I wondered if there was a
>> > policy against firmware for old wireless cards.
>>
>> Try again, this time cc linux-wireless.
>>
>> >> The next question is the license of the firmware. Who is giving you
>> >> rights to redistribute it and so on? Its preferred that the authors of
>> >> the firmware from the company involved send the patch themselves but
>> >> not required.
>> >>
>> >
>> > I had already made some enquires to the maintainers of the linux-wlan-ng
>> > project who include the firmware in their tarball (which forms the
>> > source of the Ubuntu linux-wlan-ng* packages). They checked their
>> > paper-trail as much as they could - the trail is complicated because the
>> > originating company has changed hands so many times. As far as they
>> > could tell the last owners were Conexant who freely distributed this
>> > firmware. I put words to this effect in the WHENCE file to David
>> > Woodhouse, with a signed-off-by from the guy at linux-wlan-ng project.
>>
>> OK good, the more detailed the better in the WHENCE file. Also it is
>> good for this information to be explained in the commit log entry for
>> the patch you send.
>>
>> Why doesn't a member of the linux-wlan-ng project send this patch himself?
>>
>
> Thanks for the good advice Luis. I've resent as you have suggested.
> The original linux-wlan-ng project maintainers are not working on the
> mainline staging driver, which is why they are not actively pushing the
> firmware upstream. They are in support of my efforts, however.

OK. Would be good to CC them on your next repost of the PATCH.

  Luis