[Ilugc] Linksys WRT54G
- From: siva@xxxxxxxxxxx (Sivasankar Chander)
- Date: Wed Jul 21 10:20:02 2004
Funny fact - cisco owns linksys, which makes cheap (sub $100) home
broadband routers and wireless access points. Linksys firmwares are
typically linux on a ARM chip, and this firmware is open source (so you
get a whole lot of third party firmwares for their wrt54g wireless AP +
broadband router, for example).
Actually, Linksys developed the WRT54G around the Broadcom 802.11g
reference platform long before it was bought by Cisco. The Broadcom
platform is based on Linux on a MIPS core, with a few wired and wireless
MACs added. The Broadcom Linux driver for the wireless MAC is still
closed-source, which has been the subject of a lot of debate on the
WRT54G forums - even Alan Cox has weighed in on the subject.
Anyway, it is possible to build a replacement userland and most
of the kernel for the Linksys WRT54G with enhanced functionality,
including traffic-shaping, QoS, etc., from the source that Linksys
has released - so that's good enough for me.
It remains to be seen if Cisco will remain OSS-friendly in the
next generation of the Linksys routers. It may well be that they'll
seek to move IOS into the entry-level systems also, which will be
bad for Linux wireless enthusiasts, but may actually offer
benefits to Cisco's business customers.
However, there are many other routers built around the Broadcom
platform, including offerings from Asus, Belkin, Netgear, etc., so
we should be OK even if Cisco/Linksys drops the WRT54G.
-Siva
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