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Atheros hires ath5k developerAtheros hires ath5k developerPosted Apr 17, 2008 1:46 UTC (Thu) by BenHutchings (subscriber, #37955)In reply to: Atheros hires ath5k developer by pabs Parent article: Atheros hires ath5k developer
"Intel are NOT that great, their wireless drivers still require binary-blob non-free firmware." So far as I know, all wireless Ethernet controllers require firmware. Some of them load it from flash, but since no-one expects to boot over wireless Ethernet, that's an unnecessary expense. The last controller I know of that booted from flash was the Ralink RT2560, which has been superceded. I don't whether the firmware fundamentally has to be non-free. Radio regulations in some countries might require that. Even so, it will tend to be so interdependent with the hardware as to be practically unalterable by outsiders.
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Atheros hires ath5k developer Posted Apr 17, 2008 5:59 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] Isn't Atheros HAL/OpenHAL something that runs on the host CPU? The folks at prism54.org are developing FreeMAC, free (GPLed with source code) firmware for Conexant wireless chips. Seems they have it easy though, since the Prism54 wireless cards have an ARM CPU on them. So, as long as wireless devices don't require firmware images to be signed before running them (like bitfrost), we'll likely be able to try to write free firmware - and violate the regulations :) Anyways, I don't see how one firmware image can know which country it is in and which regulations to comply with, nor if the user has a special licence to do software radio/hamradio or the like. Even a kernel driver probably wouldn't be able to know that without some kind of configuration info passed to it.
Atheros hires ath5k developer Posted Apr 17, 2008 6:22 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] Found this link after googling for the crda thing: http://lwn.net/Articles/271037/
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