Qualcomm Atheros Publishes New Network Driver

While Atheros network adapters were once notorious under Linux, their wired and wireless network adapters in recent years have been backed by permissively-licensed open-source drivers from the company. This work continues with Qualcomm Atheros announcing this week the release of a new ALX network driver.

The Qualcomm Atheros ALX driver supports the new AR8161 Gigabit Ethernet and AR8162 Fast Ethernet wired network adapters. While this is a Linux kernel network driver, QCA has put this code out under a permissive license so that developers can port this driver to new operating systems. Qualcomm Atheros is also committed to fixing all bugs found with this driver.

The ALX driver amounts to 11,000 new lines of code for the Linux kernel. This Ethernet driver hasn't been merged into Linus Torvalds' kernel tree yet, but for now can be found on the kernel mailing list.

It was just last year that developers at Qualcomm Atheros called for called for killing all proprietary drivers for good.