[Gllug] Wifi USB that works with Linux & I can buy online

[Russell Howe]

On Tue, Oct 04, 2005 at 09:25:37PM +0100, Peter Grandi wrote:
> >>> On Tue, 04 Oct 2005 19:46:36 +0100, Mike Brodbelt
> >>> <mike at coruscant.demon.co.uk> said:
> 
> [ ... ]
> 
> mike> It's worth noting that the madwifi drivers, while native,
> mike> are not fully free software, and taint the kernel.
> 
> Then essentially all WiFi drivers are not fully free software,
> as the chipset firmware is a rule closed source and proprietary,
> and must be obtained separately, and without that the card does
> not work at all.
> 
> The specific issue with the 'madwifi' driver is that part of the
> firmware is bodily incorporated into the driver, instead of a
> clean separation between driver and firmware as in other WiFi
> drivers...

It's not firmware if it doesn't execute in the peripheral itself, as far
as I'm concerned. Software which runs on the host CPU, as part of the
OS, and which communicates with the hardware is what I'd call a driver.

You are incorporating binary-only code into your kernel, and it can do
whatever it likes. There's no protection within the kernel to prevent
the madwifi code from doing Bad Things, and no way for anyone but the
madwifi folks to know exactly what it does, short of decompiling it.

A friend saw a posting to LKML(?) of an open source atheros driver,
which I haven't tried yet, also OpenBSD has a reverse-engineered driver
which is completely open source, although I've seen complaints that it
looks a lot like a fairly simple disassembly of the madwifi binary
chunk.. haven't seen the code, so couldn't tell you if that's the case
(and might not be able to tell anyhow...).

The madwifi driver has been discussed on this list previously, take a
tour of the archives if you're interested in what was said before...

That said, I do run the madwifi drivers on two Soekris net4801s, and
they run perfectly well for me, one is an AP and the other a regular
node (they provide a - very expensive! - wireless link between the ADSL
line downstairs and my LAN upstairs).

I just bought 3 identical CF cards to make testing new images for them
much easier - hopefully now they stand a chance of staying up to date.

-- 
Russell Howe       | Why be just another cog in the machine,
rhowe at siksai.co.uk | when you can be the spanner in the works?
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