OT: Atheros releases free Linux driver for Its 802.11n Devices

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 11:32:12 -0400,
  "John W. Linville" <linville at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> Previously I would have said you could expect ath9k in Fedora nearly
> as soon as it is upstream, so nearly immediately.  Unfortunately,
> a combination of unfortunate bugs and questionable changes to
> how Fedora kernels were being released (automatic release after
> just +3 in Bodhi?!?!?) caused that practice to become untenable.
> So I agreed to slow-down the flow of wireless patches into Fedora.
> FWIW I think the kernel release process has been changed a bit for
> the better in the mean time, but the agreement to slow the wireless
> patches remains in place.

There also seemed to be some issues with wireless firmware updates that may
have been related to problems with those kernel updates for wireless. In
my case I got one shortly after having some intermittant problems with
the -97 kernel. I don't know if I'll get a chance to confirm whether or not
getting the firmware update has fixed the problem or not, since I have to
return the laptop shortly and may not get back to the location where I saw
the problem before then.

Note that some discussions on LWN concerning whether kernel bugs with security
implications were being clearly labelled as such, suggests that the -97
kernel included security fixes. As such pushing those updates out a bit faster
may have been justified.