Bug 138008

This should go into the default, upstream kernel.org kernel first, that way it
will show up automatically in the next SuSE releases.

Please work with the driver's maintainer to get it upstream.

The vendor information was wrong, the chipset was ZD1211 and the homepage of the open-source driver is http://zd1211.ath.cx/.
There´s a plan to make the driver ready to be integrated, but it looks like it doesn´t happen soon. And since these adapters are top-sellers at eBay and the driver works very well I wonder why it can´t be included even if it´s not in the default kernel. There are many users which want this device to be supported.

Sorry, but at this time we are not accepting out-of-the-tree kernel drivers.

Again, the best solution is to get it upstream.

Ok, thanks for your help.
IMHO you should put a little more efforts to include hardware drivers for most common devices. This will apply to other WLAN devices as well (Marvell chipset for example). Users will jugde SuSE for that and it´s very dissappointing to buy a device which doesn´t work (while it works on Windows).

You said "Sorry, but at this time we are not accepting out-of-the-tree kernel drivers."
I´ve ssen that SuSE 10 has support for the RALink RT2500 wireless chipset which is also an external driver. Am I wrong here or is this policy really true?

The RT2500 driver is supported through the madwifi package (named
wireless-tools in opensuse). I'll forward this request to Joachim, who
maintains this package.

But in general we (ie the kernel team) are indeed not fond of supporting these
out of tree drivers in our kernel. It creates maintenance nightmares.

Joachim, please decide whether you want to include this driver in your
package, and close as WONTFIX if not

Ok thanks :)
Support is trough the "km_wlan" package though, which includes not only madwifi (which is for atheros cards) but several other cards as well (which are all external). IMHO it´s important to support the widest range of cards possible.

Well, although we of course like to see all drivers upstream, we indeed ship some external drivers as well. I've had a quick look at the driver, it should be no problem to include it. But adding WPA support for that driver will be probably more tricky, as the modified wpa_supplicant ZyDAS provides is based on wpa_supplicant version 0.2.4, but we ship 0.4.7. It's also quite late for 10.1 anyway.

In that case we will not include it, this is too much work at this time.

The patches for both wpa_supplicant and the driver should go upstream so that we can add them for 10.2.