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Is GenMAC Open Source?

Started by miturbide, 2010.02.01, 15:16:09

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miturbide

Hi

Do you know guys if GenMac is Open Source?

It has a Netlabs page but I was unable to find any reference to a CVS/SVN or source code file.

The "Browse Source Code" option on this page "http://trac.netlabs.org/genmac/" asks for password.

Regards.
Martín Itúrbide
OS2World.com NewsMaster
Open Source Advocate

Skype - martiniturbide
Google Talk - martiniturbide@gmail.com

rwklein


DougB

Some effort was put into trying to get GENMAC open sourced, or even closed sourced, but available to selected people. All of that went through Thorolf Godawa, who managed to become the front man for Willibald Meyer. The answer from Willibald is, apparently "No, it is not worth my time to do that. Find another solution". Of course, it was more than a year after Willibald quit working on GENMAC before anybody had the courtesy to inform the user community about that decision.

We, the users, are now attempting to expand the capabilities of GENMAC. In spite of being told that it is impossible to do, we are slowly adding devices to the supported category, using the "UNSUPPORTED" mode of GENMAC, and updating a few supported devices. You will  find the GENMU package at ftp://genmac@os2voice.org (use "UNSUPPORTED", without the quotes, as the password) along with GENMU-TEST  which contains UNTESTED drivers for a couple of devices (although one has now been added to the GENMU package). However, it is apparent that this project will be severely limited by the capabilities of the current GENMAC base. That means that SOMEBODY had better start developing NIC drivers, or eCS will be as dead as Microsoft, and IBM, want it to be.

Saijin_Naib

Why won't he open source it? Is he using someone else's code?

Could we not conceivably use the NDIS wrapper from Linux as a starting point for ours?

I've got a netbook with a VIA USB VNT6656 WiFi adapter that I'd love to have working in eCS. VIA has the Linux Driver Source available even..

Blonde Guy

Brendan Oakley told me that UniAud would make a good start for any Linux driver. But doesn't Linux have support for network cards compiled into the kernel, not as separate drivers?
Expert Consulting for OS/2 and eComStation

Saijin_Naib

You can go either way. The way I did it for my VIA networking USB dongle was to get the source from VIA, compile, and insmod the .ko file (kernel object?)

This will cause the module to run at boot time.

DougB

QuoteWhy won't he open source it? Is he using someone else's code?

There was some hint that suggested that that may be the case, or that something was somewhat questionable if somebody decided to push the patent thing. Nothing definite though. Then, recently, there was a suggestion that Willibald may not be well enough to do anything as mundane as work on software development. Nothing definite there either. Hopefully, if that is the case, he will recover.

I don't know the details of writing modern NIC drivers, but it seems to me that we may have a base to start from. The Realtek 8139 driver was written specifically for OS/2, and it works well. I suspect that it could be used as a base for many other drivers, as long as the technical data can be obtained from the manufacturers to be able to control the hardware. I would think that the software interface doesn't need to change much. The main problem would likely be to find someone who can, and is willing to, do the development. I am also not sure where the source would be found.

melf

#7
Who wrote the "generic prism driver"? A wifi-driver ,the last version known to me was genprism.2.0RC4 and it really never became public but was floating around and was/still is? searchable on the net. It worked very well.

Now I'm checking the genprism.os2 file, there is a name, Jens Glathe, driver copyright.

Further search: he is mentioned on os2warp.be "for his continues effort to support WiFi under OS/2, and for device driver in-depth details" and seems to have been connected to Orinoco according to another posting on os2world.
/Mikael

miturbide

Hi, thanks for your reply.

About Willibald Meyer, is he un-accessible ? is it hard to deal with him to request that he open source GenMac ? anybody has an experience with him ?

Martín Itúrbide
OS2World.com NewsMaster
Open Source Advocate

Skype - martiniturbide
Google Talk - martiniturbide@gmail.com

Saijin_Naib

If he is ill, perhaps a team of people could be gathered who could carry out the work for him until he recovers. It is a shame to have a project with this kind of potential slip away :(

chennecke

#10
From what I've been told, the following applies:

- Willibald's physician told him that if he continued to work so much, he wouldn't live much longer.

- According to Thorolf, his position is that there's nobody with the necessary skill set to continue the project and that the project will be obsolete anyway since driver architecture has changed.

Sigurd

#11
@ Christian:

Thank you very much for giving these informations - even if they are so bad for Willibald, hope he will recover - to all the others. It may help some to understand that it is not Thorolf who is responsible for the end of this project. Without him we may have had no information about it at all.

And , by the way, while trying to get the Intel 5100/5200/5300 WLAN Adapter via UNSUPPORTED mode to run, Thorolf tried his best to help me and others, without shouting this from the rooftops....

Unfortunately we did not get a usable result.

I appreciate Doug Bissets way with the GENMU files, even though I guess one has to look for another way than GENMAC to support "modern" hardware.

But - as it seems to me - the focus of the eComStation developement is the ability to run it in a virtual machine, once with Virtualbox, now in addition with VMWare - as far as I was able to realize this is because of a costumers (insurance company) needs.

As a private end user I (for me!) have to state that I realized while installing eCS in Virtualbox in Windows 7 Pro 64 bit - that I do not need eCs anymore in this environment. I think Ed Durrant's idea of a small Linux starting a virtual machine (invisible) and then eCS in it was a good one....

And it is a pitty that concentrating on one hardwarebase with a "reference system" did not make it. It is almost one year ago that we had this discussion, but ... yeah.  Okay - I bought a 4 year old "Netbook" (JVC 941) , dissambeld it (as allways  ;)  ) upgraded RAM from 256 MB to 2 GB (Oohh! I have to correct me, today arrived the additional 1 GB form the US, allthough the BIOS says there are 2016 MB of RAM the Netbook shows diplay errors right after the BIOS is passed - I remember - it may be because of the shared memory Grafic chipset... Have to investigate....at least I have 1.25 GB RAM if it is not working with 2...), HDD from a 4.200 40GB to a 5.400 160 GB and installed eCS Silver on it - LAN, WLAN, USB, Sound, Video (SNAP), internal DVD burner (!) - almost everything seems to work fine, and it has got such a nice display, haven't seen one like this on modern netbooks. Still have to figure some things out (Powermanagment works but then no sound and vice versa, PCMCIA) but this is it.

Would be nice to have support for modern chipsets LAN / WLAN though!







EugeneGorbunoff

No plans to migrate eComStation inside Virtual machine. This will kill the market and the developers.
It's necessary continue the development of native drivers and applications.

http://ecomstation.ru/download/conferences/WSE2009/WSE2009-ESWay.pdf

rwklein

Genmac is not a dead end in that perspective. We can run in unsupported mode. So far we can run 12 NIC's thank to the work of Doug. After 2.0 Steve Levine and I could look what could be done to Genmac to make it work better. No promise here. We also have some touch with developers that can make native drivers (that is OS/2 NDIS drivers).
Take a look at OS2warp.be and the GOMI NDIS drivers. I'm BTW in touch with this developer.

Roderick Klein
Mensys

miturbide

I belive that GenMAC will be dead if it is not turned open source. If you don't have a change to update the code and keep improving it it is just more abandoware to add to the list.

On the other side, if someone else tell me that had the full source code and can work on that to legally create newer versions, that will be a light at the end of the tunnel.
Martín Itúrbide
OS2World.com NewsMaster
Open Source Advocate

Skype - martiniturbide
Google Talk - martiniturbide@gmail.com