Ralink Adds RT5390 Support To Open WiFi Driver

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Kernel on 9 February 2011 at 01:24 PM EST. 16 Comments
LINUX KERNEL
Back in September there was the major victory for the open-source and Linux hardware support communities when Broadcom open-sourced an 802.11n Linux driver after years of their WiFi chipsets being notorious under Linux. There's another wireless chipset vendor now getting more serious about open-source driver support too and that's Ralink. They've now contributed patches to the rt2x00 driver project that enables their new RT5390 chipset family to be used by this open-source Linux wireless driver.

The Ralink RT5390 is an 802.11 b/g/n chipset that bears a PCI Express 1.1 interface. The product brief for the RT5390 on the Ralink web-site does advertise Linux support along side Windows and Mac OS X support.

Hitting the rt2x00 mailing list yesterday was a set of patches from a Ralink engineer providing the said support to this open-source driver.

This is not the first time that Ralink has provided open-source Linux driver code, but in the past they have just done tar-ball drops rather than actively engaging with the upstream Linux kernel community.

This achievement was noted by Greg Kroah-Hartman on his blog. Novell, the Linux Driver Project, and Greg were involved in pushing for these Ralink Linux driver improvements.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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