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On 3/15/07, Simon Waters <simon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Neil Williams wrote: > > On Thu, 15 Mar 2007 00:31:06 +0000 > > "Ben Goodger" <goodgerster@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > >> Certain e.g. networking drivers are vital for a system's operation and > >> should be shipped though easily removable. > > > > Is that primarily wireless networking or do any wired NIC cards still > > require firmware? > > Both > > Most wireless cards I've used have firmware loaded at factory, and work, > but there was a lot more fixes going on "post shipping" in the wireless > world. I'm not sure how it looks these days, I think maybe things > changed in 802.11g chipsets. > It does appear that more wireless drivers are requiring firmware to be loaded every time (not kept in non volatile space on the card) so this means more binary blobs. One issue is with people like the FCC who are **terrified** that some one will modify a wireless driver and be able to use a different frequency than allowed. Which is why some manufactures that are assisting open source also have the closed binary blob firmware to be loaded. Other issues are now that the cards are getting smarter and are actually running increasingly complex code on board, and from a design point of view this is correct you don't necessarily want the host OS doing all the work, but the downside is this often means closed blobs. At one point ralink with the rt2400 and rt2500 devices used (almost) totally host software driven cards with very little processing done by the device, but even here we had RF and BBP chips that required a series of register programmings that did things like clock rates and frequencies but we had no idea of what the numbers we were uploading did. I am less apposed to having binary blobs that are loaded to an external device to do something that binary blob drivers on my PC, that's totally different but it would of cause be better if you could have all the code. Issues with this are that there are probably no free compilers available for a given system as we are often talking micro controllers and below rather than microprocessors. -- Robin Cornelius http://www.byteme.org.uk -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html