>>>>> "il" == Isaac Levy <ike@xxx> writes: il> Basically, all the "Linksys-hack" projects are aimed at il> hardware which has to be reverse-engineered. The WRT54G is il> *not* an open hardware platform, and running anything other il> than the Linksys- supplied hardware is not supported. well, (1) maybe it's sort-of not ``open.'' But because of the GPL, you do get documentation for it in the form of source code, except when Linksys and other vendors violate the GPL. The missing piece is the Broadcom wireless driver, which does have to be reverse-engineered, thanks to Linus's rather generous (to proprietary hardware manufacturers) interpretation of the GPL w.r.t. kernel modules. The old OpenWRT just includes the original binary module. I think the new 2.6-based OpenWRT may have the reverse-engineered GPL Broadcom driver. (2) it is absolutely not true that OpenWRT runs only on Linksys. They run on a huge list of these half-closed <$100 extremely-low-wattage platforms. They also run on open Soekris-like platforms like the ones sold by magicbox.pl. (3) In spite of the fact they're completely ``open'', BSD doesn't run on magicbox.pl hardware, either. Why? BSD has no FLASH-friendly filesystem (you have to use CF, which is too expensive and power-hungry for these platforms), and it also seems to be buggier than Linux on not-i386, since all this Soekris pfsense u.s.w. stuff you will find is all i386-only. I'm no Linux zealot. I'm not trying to maintain any Linux-based firewalls any time soon. It looks like a disaster to me. But I really don't think you can call this situation anything but a missing feature for our camp. Linksys is open ``enough'' for a decent port, and in the 'L' linux-friendly version of their router they have delivered a very consistent platform over many years. And magicbox.pl is truly open as are many other similar low-cost embedded boards. but we don't have the FLASH filesystem, so we can't run on embedded devices with small NOR FLASH chips, except as a lame stateless kernel-and-FFSramdisk image. we need a CF card.
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