This is the firmware for the Qualcomm Atheros AR7010 and AR9271 USB 802.11n NICs.
This is the firmware which resides in RAM on the AR7010/AR9271 NICs. It is used by ath9k (Linux) and athn (OpenBSD) to provide wireless services.
The Qualcomm Atheros owned code is under the ClearBSD licence.
The NOTICES.TXT file contains copyright notices for software which this firmware release leverages.
There is some code that is based off of work done under contract but is owned by Qualcomm Atheros; the original copyright statements from that work are in NOTICES.TXT.
The Tensilica code (xtos/xtensa) is distributed with permission from Tensilica, Inc., under the MIT licence.
There are three ECOS source files distributed under the terms of the GPLv2, with a caveat that linking or using the source files does not bring the rest of the binary under the GPLv2. Please read the ECOS caveats in more detail.
The AR7010 is a USB/PCIe SoC with onboard RAM, ROM and flash. It comes with an external wireless chip connected via PCIe - typically an AR9280 or AR9287.
The AR9271 is a USB/Wifi SoC with onboad RAM, ROM, flash and the actual wireless chip. The wireless core is an off-shoot of the AR9285. It is a single-chip solution.
You're in for a treat.
Install the cmake build tool (http://www.cmake.org/). Major distributions have packages for this.
For FreeBSD - install gmake and wget.
You first have to build the toolchain.
$ make toolchain
$ gmake toolchain
(Yes, I made this work on FreeBSD as well.)
Next, build the firmware.
$ make -C target_firmware
$ gmake -C target_firmware
You will end up with two .fw files - one for the AR7010 and one for the AR9271 in the target_firmware directory.
You can clean the firmware build (when you wish to force a rebuild) by doing:
Linux:
$ make -C target_firmware clean
FreeBSD:
$ gmake -C target_firmware clean
You need to then copy this into the relevant location for your operating system. Yes, this means you need a driver. No, there's no FreeBSD driver yet for this particular chipset, sorry.
Please file bugs in github - http://github.com/qca/open-ath9k-htc-firmware/issues .
Here you go:
http://lists.infradead.org/mailman/listinfo/ath9k_htc_fw
And
ath9k_htc_fw@lists.infradead.org