Last sunday, Maxime Bizon has submitted a series of patches to the linux-mips mailing list, adding support for Broadcom 63xx SOCs. Shortly after, these patches have been added to OpenWrt by Florian Fainelli.

This is definitely great news, because the old BCM63xx codebase was old and hardly maintainable, whereas the new one includes GPL'd Ethernet and USB support.

What is even better is that Freebox SA (Maxime's employer) and Broadcom have agreed to let Maxime publish his patches (under GPL).

Here is what these 12 patches support:
- new core support (arch/mips/bcm63xx)
- integrated ethernet MAC
- integrated ethernet PHY
- OHCI and EHCI USB host controllers
- BCM6348 and BCM6358 board support

Routers based on 6348 or 6358 SOCs include:
- 3Com 3CRWDR200A-75
- Asus AM200g / AM604 / AM604G / WL600G
- Belkin F5D7633-4B / F5D9630-1/2/3/5
- Comtrend CT536/1+ / CT638/1
- D-Link DSL2640B / DSL2740B / DSL2741B
- Davolink DV201AMR
- Dynalink RTA1046VW
- Hitachi AH4021 / AH4222
- Huawei HG520 / HG550
- Linksys WAG54GS / WAG54GX2 / WAG300N / WAG325N
- Netgear DG834G / DG834GT / DG834N / DG834PN
- T-Com Speedport 500V / W500V
- Thomson ST585 / ST780
- USRobotics USR9107 / USR9108 / USR9113 / USR9114
- Zhone 6218 / 6228 / 6238

There are also numerous european ISP using DSL router / gateways based on these Broadcom SOCs:
- BT Voyager 2091/2100/2110 (BT [UK ISP], hacking)
- Neufbox 4 (SFR [FR ISP], hacking)
- Freebox v4 (Free [FR ISP], hacking)
- Livebox (Orange [FR ISP], hacking)
- Speedport (Deutsche Telekom [DE ISP], hacking)
- W-Gate (Alice [IT ISP], hacking)

Future work will focus on:
- adding support for BCM6338, BCM6345, BCM6368 and BCM6816 using the existing infrastructure
- merging watchdog and master SPI drivers

Now's time to free your router. Happy hacking!