Debian to vote on its firmware path

Posted Aug 31, 2022 20:09 UTC (Wed) by bartoc (guest, #124262)
In reply to: Debian to vote on its firmware path by patrakov
Parent article: Debian to vote on its firmware path

tbf, especially for modern laptops, distributing Wireless PHY firmware, even if nonfree (and it all is nonfree) makes sense. After all even if a vendor _wanted_ to make their wifi firmware fully free they likely could not, the FCC does not look kindly on devices that allow fully free firmware. This stance from the FCC is really rather annoying, and ideally would be changed, but not including wifi firmware in Debian in the meantime is unlikely to change it and will make improvements in other areas harder. After all, if you want to make Debian work great on your hardware, but know making the wifi work will call down the wrath of the FCC on your device, then you may not even bother with anything else.

Debian to vote on its firmware path

Posted Aug 31, 2022 21:32 UTC (Wed) by brunowolff (guest, #71160) [Link] (1 responses)

There is free firmware for b43 and ath9 wireless devices. I think the b43 firmware has some issues as development stopped before the bugs got shaken out. But you can still use it to get a good enough connection to switch over to Broadcom's firmware.

Debian to vote on its firmware path

Posted Sep 1, 2022 6:51 UTC (Thu) by johill (subscriber, #25196) [Link]

Last I checked, b43 firmware basically still copied chunks of disassembled code from Broadcom's firmware though. Not that it matters much in practice (Broadcom isn't going to care and regulatory-wise those firmware images weren't doing anything anyway, they're just doing lower MAC processing), but ... calling it fully free when there are chunks of "nobody understands this part" in there is a bit of a stretch?

Happy to be proven wrong if they fixed it somehow in the 10+ years I wasn't looking.

Debian to vote on its firmware path

Posted Sep 1, 2022 1:42 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

Debian already includes free WiFi firmware for ath9k_htc and carl9170 based devices. We are missing the OpenFWWF one for b43 devices though.

https://wiki.debian.org/Firmware/Open#Radio