There's actually support for many non-x86 architectures; look on 
  sourceforge (the madwifi project).

I didn't realize that (none of the other archs are in the netbsd tree
under src/contrib/sys/arch/*/dev).
The version in netbsd is labeled '12-dec-2003', and I suppose that
should get updated to the 2004-01-12 version.

For anyone who is inclined to try the sourceforge versions, here's the
cheat sheet for getting the bits quickly:

$ cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/madwifi login
$ cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/madwifi co madwifi
$ cd madwifi/hal/linux && ls *.uu
arm9-le-thumb-elf.hal.o.uu              powerpc-be-eabi.hal.o.uu
i386-elf.hal.o.uu                       powerpc-le-eabi.hal.o.uu
mipsisa32-be-elf.hal.o.uu               xscale-be-elf.hal.o.uu
mipsisa32-le-elf.hal.o.uu

It would be nice if 'ident' or something on the .o got a revision
number and date.  I tried strings and ident and wasn't able to get the
build date.  From dyoung's commit comments I think that netbsd
currently has the 11-dec-03 version which is labelled 0.9.6.11.
But, it seems the linux hals and the freebsd hal that is used in
netbsd are different:

netbsd:

athhal-elf.o: ELF 32-bit LSB relocatable, Intel 80386, version 1 (FreeBSD), not stripped
text    data    bss     dec     hex     filename
131435  4260    432     136127  213bf   athhal-elf.o

sourceforge after uudecode:
hal.o: ELF 32-bit LSB relocatable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), not stripped

sourceforge after cvs up -r 1.1.1.5 i386-elf.hal.o.uu and uudecode
hal.o: ELF 32-bit LSB relocatable, Intel 80386, version 1 (FreeBSD), not stripped
text    data    bss     dec     hex     filename
102210  4280    432     106922  1a1aa   hal.o

Sorry if I'm being a pain, but I'm obviously missing something about
how the hal binaries work.  I think they are os indedepent (depending
only on processor/endian and exec format), so I'm guessing the ELF
system name is just where they were compiled.  But I was not able to
tie the bits in NetBSD cvs back to what I think is the corresponding
version in madwifi cvs.

    Greg