The b43 days were definitely special, and that was a full from scratch reverse engineered driver plus open firmware, which is a crazy accomplishment. These days though, we just accept that we're going to have to run vendor firmware, either because there's signing involved or because it's a huge amount of work to attempt to reverse engineer and reimplement that bit. Firmwares have grown from dozens of kilobytes to megabytes and it's just not viable to rewrite all that any more, if it's even possible.
OTOH, we also have better tools for and experience reverse engineering now than we did back then. Ghidra has made "proper" disassembly and decompilation accessible to anyone, and we can run proprietary OSes in VMs to study how they interact with hardware.
> As long as the hardware (or the vendor) is not intentionally malicious towards Linux or being reverse engineered. I've seen my fair share. :-)
Well, it doesn't happen that often outside of closed platforms (i.e. needing an exploit to do anything) and Nvidia ;-)
OTOH, kudos for all the hard work you're doing on the kernel. Maybe one day I'd have enough spare time to work on that marvelous beast.
> Once you have a team of the right people and enough motivation, getting reverse engineered hardware working on Linux doesn't take as long as everyone thinks :-)
As long as the hardware (or the vendor) is not intentionally malicious towards Linux or being reverse engineered. I've seen my fair share. :-)