Madwifi now free software.
Thought you guys might like to know, in addition to the ath5k driver that is part of the mac80211 subsystem in recent kernels, the most recent commit to the Madwifi Project's SVN includes complete source code for the HAL under "ath_hal/" and the UUencoded binaries have been deleted.
ath5k is "the future" but the madwifi code base is much more mature and will probably see specialized usage for quite some time to come--if you run a Linux-based AP with an Atheros wifi card, or if you do research or serious wireless hacking (not cracking, mind you, but think like Pringles antennas, etc.) you are probably not ready to switch to ath5k just yet.
When 802.11b no longer remained viable, the former users of the HostAP kernel drivers for the Intersil Prism chipsets largely migrated to Madwifi and Atheros.
Many of the features of mac80211, such as VAP/VLAN functionality (multiple logical network interfaces all backed simultaneously by one hardware device) found their origin or inspiration in the madwifi code base.
The opened HAL source code is Dual BSD/GPL licensed.
Note: My understanding is that this is the "real" HAL. So if you heard about the Atheros code drop that was not the source code for the binary objects that lived in the madwifi source tree, this isn't it. Sam Leffler (the author of the binary HAL under Atheros NDA) was able to convince Atheros to allow him to release his source code.
ath5k is "the future" but the madwifi code base is much more mature and will probably see specialized usage for quite some time to come--if you run a Linux-based AP with an Atheros wifi card, or if you do research or serious wireless hacking (not cracking, mind you, but think like Pringles antennas, etc.) you are probably not ready to switch to ath5k just yet.
When 802.11b no longer remained viable, the former users of the HostAP kernel drivers for the Intersil Prism chipsets largely migrated to Madwifi and Atheros.
Many of the features of mac80211, such as VAP/VLAN functionality (multiple logical network interfaces all backed simultaneously by one hardware device) found their origin or inspiration in the madwifi code base.
The opened HAL source code is Dual BSD/GPL licensed.
Note: My understanding is that this is the "real" HAL. So if you heard about the Atheros code drop that was not the source code for the binary objects that lived in the madwifi source tree, this isn't it. Sam Leffler (the author of the binary HAL under Atheros NDA) was able to convince Atheros to allow him to release his source code.
