After several weeks of effort, we at OpenedHand managed to have a reliable (and also pretty fast) 802.11 driver for the next OpenMoko phone, the GTA02 a.k.a. Neo FreeRunner. Mandatory web browsing screenshot:

The code is currently sitting in the OpenMoko kernel patchset, split into 3 parts: The driver itself, the SDIO stack (from Atheros), and the SDIO host controller .

The GTA02 is running an AR6001 802.11 b/g chipset from Atheros, and the driver is now capable of associating with open, WEP or WPA (1 or 2) access points. It works fine with a vanilla wpa_supplicant and since we’re using the wext driver you’ll need a 0.5.x wpa_supplicant.

The code is GPL and eventually we’d like to push it upstream. This will require a 2 step effort:

1. Getting rid of Atheros SDIO stack and using the kernel’s one. This has been done for Atheros 1.1 firmware based driver (see here), but needs to be done for the new and upcoming 2.0 firmware version.
2. Cleaning the driver code and make it mainline friendly. This will probably need a significant effort as the current code base needs some cleanups…