A FAQ about today's FSF release

I've had a few people ask me some questions. There's also been a few questions on slashdot. I'll update this article as more questions come in.

Was it all me?

No, I didn't do the bulk of the work. Luis did the bulk of the legal hoop-jumping and review process at work. I grabbed it near the end of this process (so he could move onto other things) and shepherded the process of getting things ready for open sourcing.

I encouraged some external developers from the community to come on board and help in the initial effort to get it to compile and work correctly under the open source Tensilica toolchain rather than the internal toolchain.

I've fixed a few bugs here and there - eg the RX path TSF bugs that stopped the NICs from working in Mesh mode, along with some other fallout issues from the toolchain migration.

I wanted the bulk of the work to come from the community rather than me. I don't want to be the only person working on this. Thankfully I'm not! There's an active community now!

I'll likely do a bunch more development in the firmware code once I get it working on FreeBSD!

Why is it only one device? Why is it so expensive? Why that device?

You'll have to ask the FSF that.

How different is this to the non-USB stuff?

Like a lot of manufacturers, Atheros reuses its CPU and Wifi cores everywhere they can.

The AR7010 designs have an external AR9280 or AR9287 NIC. This is exactly the same as a mini-PCIe design - the same chip, speaking PCIe, etc.

The AR9271 design is a single chip solution (see below) with an AR9285 NIC internally. I don't know whether internally it speaks PCIe or whether they just glued the NIC onto the AHB like they do for other integrated CPU+SoC designs (eg the AR913x, AR933x, AR934x, etc.)

But once you get past the USB and CPU parts, it looks exactly the same as the PCIe devices Atheros driver developers know and love.

Just keep in mind the main difference - the wifi part doesn't DMA directly to/from your computer memory. It has to go via buffer RAM on the AR7010 core in order to then send or receive it via USB endpoints.

What about the other NICs? The AR7010 based ones?

The AR7010 based ones are precursors to the single-chip solution that the FSF is selling a NIC for (the AR9271.) The AR7010 has USB on one side and PCIe on the other. It runs effectively the same firmware as the AR9271 NIC, save for some different ROM addresses, memory map and some other little differences.

The AR7010 based devices are thus "just as free" as the AR9271 NIC the FSF is selling.

I'm not sure if the FSF is going to certify an AR7010 design. I hope they can find a dual-band AR7010+AR9280 ath9k_htc NIC and sell that as part of their open hardware programme.

What is this AR9271 anyway? Why is it only 1x1 and 2GHz only?

The AR9271 is a single chip solution containing:

• An AR7010 style core, with minor differences
• Some RAM and ROM (but less RAM than the AR7010; no I don't know why.)
• An AR9285 derivative (which is the 2GHz, 1x1 chip.)

Like a lot of things that manufacturers do, it's a "cost savings" design for a specific market. Even now, laptop and tablet manufacturers want to skimp on 5GHz NIC designs in order to save some cash. No, I don't know why. No, I can't quote costs.

How can I help?

Download the firmware, download a linux-next or compat-wireless tarball - or, run OpenBSD + athn for now - compile stuff up and hack away.