Intel Releases Linux Driver For Centrino WLAN

Werner Heuser writes "Finally Intel has made their different announcements about Linux support for the WLAN part of the Centrino technology become true. Though not yet officially announced an Open-Source driver with included firmware is available at SourceForge. The driver is still experimental and supposed to work with 2.4 Kernels as well as with 2.6 ones." (See these previous stories for some background.)

Comments

This couldn't be better timed...

[SomeGuyFromCA]

My Dell Inspiron 600m is arriving today. Wheeeee...

Re:This couldn't be better timed...

[Directrix1]

Everybody, now this is your chance. Support Intel in their decision to open-source a driver, by buying their product. They are a rare breed.

Re:This couldn't be better timed...

[SomeGuyFromCA]

> My Dell Inspiron 600m is arriving today. Wheeeee... ... Unfortunately, I just remembered that (in order to connect to the network at work, which uses AES, which the Intel 2100 miniPCI can't do) I got a TrueMobile 1300 b/g in it, which if memory serves is a Broadcom chipset.

Bah.

Then again, I just traded my Intel 2100 from my Insp 4100 for a Microsoft MN-520 PCMCIA...

Re:This couldn't be better timed...

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely. I believe Prism have a much better attitude to open source developers. Why not support them?

Re:This couldn't be better timed...

[RenatoRam]

Did you read past the first 3 lines on the website?

Go read the licenses: what company name do you read there?

On my screen FireFox renders seveal times the word "Intel"... but maybe It's just me.

They are releasing the specs and a semi-working beta to the community. Their developers AND the voluntary ones will improve the driver.

That's EXACTLY what linux users and developers have been asking for ages, i reckon.

It's a win-win situation: Intel gets a fully working and highly optimized driver for free and in a shorter time, and the community gets a GOOD driver for free.

Now tell us: what's wrong with Intel's approach, please.

Intel Feeling the Pressure?

[CrankyFool]

This really feels like Intel's finally feeling its stranglehold on the industry wavering a little (given AMD's 64bit success). I'd like to believe that this is going to lead them to start treating us like customers, rather than prisoners. Certainly, this is a nice first step.

Re:Intel Feeling the Pressure?

[bill_doors]

I think the same... big hardware companies are changing the way they see Linux community and the computer market at all. Everyday we are more and more and more!!!
(I feel as the Agent Smith a little... he he he)

Re:Intel Feeling the Pressure?

[Oriumpor]

This is no first step, it's the begining of the end of many steps Intel has taken forth with it's centrino *line.* The only remaining piece was the WLAN component they have already facilitated the release of the speed stepping and other integrated components.

Wintel isn't ALWAYS the badguy.

NOW, I can say THANK GOODNESS no more lockups in Fedora from DriverLoader BS, now my only question is how will they allow Linux users to flash their firmware when the manufacturers don't provide floppy drives on most of the Centrino lines.

Re:Intel Feeling the Pressure?

[hardaker]

We must treat this as a good thing. They really have done as promised, done what everyone has wanted them to do for a while, and they started with a piece of hardware that is probably in the top 10 list for desired support (I know its the #1 driver on my "need" list).

Thank you Intel! For a company that has gotten a lot of flack on Slashdot, thank you for listening to community desires and responding in a very positive way. You went up a point in my book (which I'm sure is your goal).

Re:Intel Feeling the Pressure?

[John Hurliman]

K3b allows you to emulate a floppy disk on CDROM by burning a DOS bootdisk image to CD. When it boots you have A:\ which is the contents of the image file, and if CDROM drivers were loaded you have another drive letter for the the rest of the CD contents. I flashed the BIOS on my laptop from a Linux only environment like this.

Re:Intel Feeling the Pressure?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ack! What is this K3b program that I've been searching for my whole life! Come to me, oh pretty one.

Can you post a URL or more details please?

Will this allow me to update the bios on my Thinkpad T41 as well!

Re:Intel Feeling the Pressure?

[Ktulu_03]

http://www.k3b.org/

Re:Intel Feeling the Pressure?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes they feel the pressure. That's why they released the driver 6 months later for your huge market share OS than that small upstart Windows.

Get a clue linluser.

Re:Intel Feeling the Pressure?

[the Hewster]

my only question is how will they allow Linux users to flash their firmware when the manufacturers don't provide floppy drives on most of the Centrino lines.

the article mentions Firmware but i suspect it is similar to some USB ADSL modems: the firmware is routinely uploaded by the driver during init. I doubt this means the firmware needs to be updated to *support* Linux (do you remember ever flashing any hardware's BIOS to run Linx?), the Windows driver probably does the same thing.

Re:Intel Feeling the Pressure?

[Mysticalfruit]

The correct format for a CDROM where the first track is bootable (and presented by the BIOS) as a 1.44MB floppy is called "El Torito"

Boy oh boy, were those IBMer's wacky...

Re:Intel Feeling the Pressure?

[DarkOx]

well, do what most smart people do and creat a little 5 or 10 meg partion somewhare on your drive and install free dos to it. Then make it a LILO boot option. Lilo can even do some devices mapping if its not the first partion of your first disk. Although I usually recomend makeing it that becase Linux really does not care what partions its on at least not on x86 IDE systems and if you are really really borked and have to use fdisk from the dos partion for any reason it will stay bootable. Put a basic set of dos utils on it so you can do some emergency stuff if you need to is also good. Now the kicker is you can mount it under linux and put your firmware updates on it. Then just boot to it and run it.

Re:Intel Feeling the Pressure?

[cduffy]

NOW, I can say THANK GOODNESS no more lockups in Fedora from DriverLoader BS

Ya know, I've been using ndiswrapper for quite some time, and it hasn't crashed my machine yet.

From ipw2100_main.c

[tcopeland]

Whew!

if (!((r <= w && (e < r || e >= w)) || (e < r && e >= w))) {
IPW2100_DEBUG_TX("exit - no processed packets ready to release.\n");
return 0;
}

Fortunately there's a little ASCII art right above it that helps explain what that if condition does:

/*
* Quick graphic to help you visualize the following
* if / else statement
*
* ===>| s---->|===============
* e>|
* | a | b | c | d | e | f | g | h | i | j | k | l
* r---->|
* w
*
* w - updated by driver
* r - updated by firmware
* s - start of oldest BD entry (txq->oldest)
* e - end of oldest BD entry
*
*/

Re:From ipw2100_main.c

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever happened to meaningful variables (which is taught at age 12 before you even touch a language)

Re:From ipw2100_main.c

[Anonymous Coward]

Duh!
This is high performance code! Single-letter variable names execute more faster.
U R teh st00p3d.

Re:From ipw2100_main.c

[Shisha]

Judging by the scope of these variables and the fact that they seem to be docummented right at the top, I don't think anyone could have an issue with that.

In fact, sometimes explaining what a variable means and then using just a one letter name is much more helpful than names like "thisOneINeedToDoThisBecauseOfThat".

Just think of the use of "i" in for loops, no one in the right set of mind would use something like "loopCounter".

It's a bit like in PDE theory, if you use t, then you don't have to bother specifying that t belongs to [0,T] and that it's time - everyone expects that.

Re:From ipw2100_main.c

[sydb]

Just think of the use of "i" in for loops, no one in the right set of mind would use something like "loopCounter"

Quite, but if you're choosing decent variable names, you would never think of chooseing loopCounter!

What are you counting? That's what the variable name should be.

Iterating over rows in a matrix (or whatever)? then the variable name should be 'row'! Not rowCount or RowNumber or count or r, simply 'row'.

Then row++ makes sense - next row.

Re:From ipw2100_main.c

[jsebrech]

On the other hand, with nested loops I can't count how many times I've mixed up j and i, and not seen it at a cursory glance of the bugridden code. If I used outerCounter and innerCounter that wouldn't happen (as much). Not that I'm going to abandon my i's and j's ofcourse.

Re:From ipw2100_main.c

[Shisha]

True, I couldn't agree more! Especially if you have ever tried to speed up multiplication big matricies, by saving the second matrix transposed in the computer memory? That way the read ahead into L1 (and L2) caches that many CPU architectures use is used efficiently. Otherwise the CPU reads ahead the row, but we're really going down columns and so the main memory has to be accessed all the time instead of the fast CPU caches.

Re:From ipw2100_main.c

[sydb]

I can't tell whether your ridiculing me, or just missed my (very simple) point... please let me know!

Re:From ipw2100_main.c

[Anonymous Coward]

The length of variable names should be in inverse proportion to their scoping and frequency of use. For small functions and loops one letter is fine because it's not hard to remember them while you're looking at the block. However as the scope extends it becomes harder to remember where they came from and as such they should be longer to reflect this.

Re:From ipw2100_main.c

[alex_tibbles]

but when the loop becomes over a page long, grepping for 'i' becomes tedious.

Re:From ipw2100_main.c

[Imperator]

Ahhh... now it's all clear.

*blinks*

Re:From ipw2100_main.c

[Shisha]

Sorry, I'm not making fun of you and I don't think I missed your point either.

All I wanted to say that you're right, that there are sometimes cases when even what is what in nested for loops gets confusing and then it's useful to choose proper names even for the iterators (counters, whatever one calls them).

Re:From ipw2100_main.c

[mefus]

or just missed my (very simple) point

My guess is the latter. It's a little off topic, but if Mult. matrix A and matrix B then you'll get fewer cache misses if you transform B before doing the column A, row B, multiplications.

The maintenance crutch is to use appropriate variable names indicating what's being multiplied?

I'm just guessing, though. And it's language dependent (like Fortran arranges matrices (in memory) differently than C/C++.

Re:From ipw2100_main.c

[HermanZA]

My favourite is things like this:

#define TWENTY 19

That is much worse than single character names.

Re:From ipw2100_main.c

[Ben Hutchings]

Haven't you ever used a circular buffer before? r and w are the read and write positions within the buffer; e is the "end of oldest BD entry" (BD = buffer descriptor, at a guess). The condition for throwing out a "BD entry" is that the end of it is within the free space in the buffer after w and before r, allowing for wrap-around.

Re:From ipw2100_main.c

[tcopeland]

> the end of it is within the free
> space in the buffer after w and before r

Hm, nifty! Thanks!

Re:From ipw2100_main.c

[sydb]

cool, I'm a bit sensitive :-)

By the way your web page at Warwick is no longer active.

Re:From ipw2100_main.c

[bangular]

thisOneINeedToDoThisBecauseOfThat
getsFlashesOfJavaProgrammersRefusalToUseShortVaria bleNames

Re:From ipw2100_main.c

[Shisha]

Yes, I guess I should get rid of the link. The reason that it's not active is simply because I've finished at Warwick 2 years ago. Time flies, really.

Re:From ipw2100_main.c

[kscguru]

You think that's bad, wait till you see Objective-C...

[ptr theFuncThatUsesA:aPtr andAlsoUsesB:bPtr andTakesAFlag:flag andMaybeAStringForGoodMeasure:str];

Opensource

[gspr]

Wow, I thought people were saying the official Intel driver would be proprietary (at least to start off with). Such a positive surprise! If only I had the cash for a laptop... *sigh*

Re:OT: The Borg Icon

[cooley]

What is this "Microsoft" that you speak of?

NDISWRAPPER

[cuban321]

Until these drivers stabilize you can use NDISWRAPPER.

This tool allows you to run the Windows driver for some wireless cards that have little or no Linux support.

Daniel

Re:NDISWRAPPER

[gspr]

Do not encourage the use of NDISWRAPPER! Someone will probably moderate this as Troll, but come on - we all know that having such a "fallback option" makes the hardware makers relax more when it comes to releasing natively running, opensource Linux drivers!

Re:NDISWRAPPER

[Zakabog]

But for them to relax more they'd have to be working on something in the first place, most of the hardware makers that are willing to support linux are gonna do it with the best drivers they can, not have people running their software in linux with some little hack. And the ones that don't support linux don't care that some little app lets people run windows drivers, they weren't going to support linux anyway it's not worth it for them. If NDISWRAPPER works then people should use it, I know I'd deffinitely use it if it supports my laptops network card (haven't been able to get this thing to work at all, some fairly old lucent technologies wireless card, I think there is support for some newer version of this card but not mine.) I'd use a newer card with linux support but the laptop itself doesn't support these (dunno why, tried some netgear card it didn't like that very much I think the PCMCIA slot in my laptop is 16 bit or something like that it's an old laptop.)

Re:NDISWRAPPER

[Anonymous Coward]

In the past, NDIS was sold as a cross-platform, documented standard -- which qualifies it for Linux support, IMO.

Note that NDIS itself has nothing to do with the "open source" status of a driver. NDISWrapper would allow a vendor to release an open source NDIS driver in order to reduce their porting costs. This would tide people over until the driver could be ported to the native interface.

Re:NDISWRAPPER

[paranode]

Well for many people, it comes down to having their wireless card work under NDISWRAPPER in Linux, or just scrapping Linux and using Windows. By having a "fallback option" to Windows instead of the wrapper, I think hardware makers will relax even more, which has been the case up until now.

Re:NDISWRAPPER

[MuMart]

I like the idea of allowing people to use linux. After all, the hardware is already a proprietary blob with bugs of it's own. Nobody complains about that.

Personally, I'd prefer a framework for userspace device drivers, so a company can release a linux executable along with their hardware so users can install/use it quickly. I don't see why this would be so bad for linux. People who write device drivers do it because they enjoy it. It's hardly going to stop them.

Anyway, that way the open source drivers in the kernel will always have the performance edge.

Re:NDISWRAPPER

[bronaugh]

Yeah, but if people buy some card because of $x feature knowing that there's NDIS wrappers, when they wouldn't otherwise, it gives companies less economic incentive to develop Linux drivers -- they aren't losing significant market share.

Please don't just look at the micro scale -- no one cares about Your Little Problem. It's more important to solve the larger problems (like companies that don't *properly* support their hardware aka don't provide linux drivers or specs to create said drivers) than to solve stupid problems like "waa I got a shitty wireless NIC, I want it to work, waa".

Buy another NIC, and send the original back to the manufacturer charred and burned, with a note saying "It's about as useful in this state to me as it was when I hadn't drenched it in gasoline and tossed a match at it". A less flippant solution that's less destructive to the environment (heh) is to get a refund for the piece of hardware. That sends a clearer, and less ambiguous message.

Take a more long-term look at things. Please.

Re:NDISWRAPPER

[sydb]

I think the PCMCIA slot in my laptop is 16 bit or something

If you had to whittle down the runner on the PC card in order to slide it comfortably in the slot, then yes, you are trying to put a 32-bit PC card into a 16-bit PCMCIA slot!

Re:NDISWRAPPER

[Inuchance]

You're both right! You should continue to use NDISWRAPPER, while complaining about it every chance you get.

Re:NDISWRAPPER

[Zakabog]

Yeah, but if people buy some card because of $x feature knowing that there's NDIS wrappers, when they wouldn't otherwise, it gives companies less economic incentive to develop Linux drivers -- they aren't losing significant market share.

And they aren't gaining many sales to people who use NDIS wrappers, I think those people would say "Ok I have linux, I want a card to work in linux, oh this card supports it natively. If you buy a card for linux that uses some driver that probably won't work, you're not a very smart consumer and don't deserve native linux support in the first place. It's way better to use some kind of hardware with a manufacturers driver (most of the time, unless it really sucks but then at least you look for an open source alternative.) The only people that would use the NDIS wrappers are the people who might have bought a computer a year ago or from gateway or something like that, or found some hardware in a junked computer, then they say "Hey I wish this would work in linux" download some wrapper and they're set. And besides it's not like the company knows what OS anyone is running the hardware on right after they buy it.

Please don't just look at the micro scale -- no one cares about Your Little Problem.

That's exactly why you should use a wrapper, the company isn't going to give a damn that you want to use the hardware in linux so why would they support it? They can't just look at their profits and say "Look at all these people buying our hardware to use in linux, we should develop some drivers for them" they just see people buying the hardware they have no idea what the people are going to do with them.

It's more important to solve the larger problems (like companies that don't *properly* support their hardware aka don't provide linux drivers or specs to create said drivers) than to solve stupid problems like "waa I got a shitty wireless NIC, I want it to work, waa".

Umm you can put anything in there like -

"waa your company doesn't properly support your hardware, don't provide linux drivers, or release the specs to create said drivers"

You even said it before "no one cares about Your Little Problem" they don't care that you want linux support, they already have your money (and if they didn't you don't care about linux support cause you don't have their hardware.)

Buy another NIC, and send the original back to the manufacturer charred and burned, with a note saying "It's about as useful in this state to me as it was when I hadn't drenched it in gasoline and tossed a match at it". A less flippant solution that's less destructive to the environment (heh) is to get a refund for the piece of hardware. That sends a clearer, and less ambiguous message.

That sends a message, your hardware didn't work. They don't know why though! Do you not understand this? There isn't a little bell that goes off every time a linux user refuses to buy their software, you have to tell them and then we're back to square one "no one cares about Your Little Problem".

Take a more long-term look at things. Please.

Take a more long-term look at your comments. Please.

Re:NDISWRAPPER

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, then my slot should be fine since the card fit perfectly, I have two slots, I guess the top one's 16 bit since I don't have any cards that fit in their and the bottom's 32 and all my cards are 32, now I have NO IDEA why the slot isn't working :-/

Re:NDISWRAPPER

[bronaugh]

By the way, I'm sorry I patronized a bit there -- I was writing in a hurry, and I'm none too fond of NDIS wrappers for a number of reasons. I wish you hadn't resorted to patronizing me, however.

Anyhow, onto the body....

Yeah, but if people buy some card because of $x feature knowing that there's NDIS wrappers, when they wouldn't otherwise, it gives companies less economic incentive to develop Linux drivers -- they aren't losing significant market share.

And they aren't gaining many sales to people who use NDIS wrappers, I think those people would say "Ok I have linux, I want a card to work in linux, oh this card supports it natively. If you buy a card for linux that uses some driver that probably won't work, you're not a very smart consumer and don't deserve native linux support in the first place. It's way better to use some kind of hardware with a manufacturers driver (most of the time, unless it really sucks but then at least you look for an open source alternative.) The only people that would use the NDIS wrappers are the people who might have bought a computer a year ago or from gateway or something like that, or found some hardware in a junked computer, then they say "Hey I wish this would work in linux" download some wrapper and they're set. And besides it's not like the company knows what OS anyone is running the hardware on right after they buy it.

You think most people would actually ask that? Hmm, you're assuming the manufacturer lists enough information on their website or on the box to _determine_ that the device does, or does not, have linux support. This is not always an easy task, even using corroborating information from the community. If there is an NDIS wrapper available which is nice and friendly and easy to use, a lot of people are apathetic enough to say, "well, OK, it doesn't work as well as I'd hoped, but I'll use it anyhow" -- and thus, the item won't get returned with said reason, and so on and so forth - and no feedback gets back to company.

A really nasty issue with the NDIS wrapper approach is that an unpleasant company could claim Linux support when really they just supply the NDIS wrapper on their CD, further confusing the marketplace. You could then have devices which don't have native drivers claiming linux support, beside devices that do have native drivers yet do not claim linux support. Talk about havoc!

As to the 'used' argument... The flip side to it is that once most devices have been out 1-2 years, there is linux support. There are exceptions, but they are usually limited to graphics cards and other such 'complicated' devices.

Please don't just look at the micro scale -- no one cares about Your Little Problem.

That's exactly why you should use a wrapper, the company isn't going to give a damn that you want to use the hardware in linux so why would they support it? They can't just look at their profits and say "Look at all these people buying our hardware to use in linux, we should develop some drivers for them" they just see people buying the hardware they have no idea what the people are going to do with them.

Apathy is a shitty solution. Companies do end up caring, when it hits them in the pocketbook. If they look online, and see how many people, for instance, are mad about Intel Pro Wireless stuff, the company's going to be thinking "Hmm, this can't be good PR"... alternatively, they might be thinking "We're probably losing sales because of this". Both are good arguments for spending a few dollars to create a Linux driver -- it results in community goodwill, and it results in direct profits. Also, a factor I think some companies are starting to clue into is that people who run Linux tend to be considerably more clueful than average -- and thus the average majority ask -them-, the "gurus", when they're going to make a purchasing decision or such. The reasons are as follows:

1. because they know that their "guru" will make sure they don't get a p

Re:NDISWRAPPER

[LuSiDe]

Hey that's the same i do with those proprietary NVidia drivers. I always thought it was rather a dumb, unlogic decision.

This is a great sign

[KingOfBLASH]

I can remember the day when I could only get spotty support for most hardware on my Linux box. Buying a computer was complicated if I wanted to use Linux -- I might only have one or two choices for a component (i.e. soundcard) because the drivers came from the community. This is a great sign, if Intel starts supporting all of their products under Linux, other vendors will follow suit, and it won't be long before you'll see Lindows boxes alongside the Macs at CompUSA!

Re:This is a great sign

[Zakabog]

This is a great sign, if Intel starts supporting all of their products under Linux, other vendors will follow suit, and it won't be long before you'll see Lindows boxes alongside the Macs at CompUSA!

Yeah I know pretty soon we might get some linux support from other companies! Like NVidia, 3Comm, Ceative Labs, ATI, Netgear, Linksys, man pretty soon I'm gonna be able to build a sweet linux computer!

*Looks at his own two linux computers*

Oh...

I'd actually be more excited about Intel's decision if they had any products I actually wanted. I don't know of any companies I'd buy from whose products don't work in linux one way or another. Sure some things might not work, but I haven't run into anything in the past 2-3 years that I couldn't get working in linux although setting up my ATI card was a real pain. There are even a few no name devices that I wouldn't expect to work, that just happened to have support since they use the same chipset as like 40 other no name devies.

Re:This is a great sign

[indigeek]

I'm gonna be able to build a sweet linux computer!

This is something i don't understand. In India and many parts of Asia, due to duty structures (computer parts have lesser taxes than fully assembled systems etc) and due to proximity to china, it is cheaper to build your own computer than to buy it pre-built. So I have built all my computers myself - buying RAM from one shop and video cards from another.
My computer had an Intel i810 mobo when they just came out. They had reasonably bad Linux support(video would not work with Linuxes avbl. then) , this was in 99 I think.
But after that I have built myself atleast 3 computers, 1 intel and 2 AMD , and Redhat has worked straight out of the box. This is inspite of me buying the cheapest mobos available, with integrated everything, or going for the absolutely latest on others. On the otherhand, until I put in the manufacturer provided binary drivers, windows support has always been bad - No SVGA, no network etc.
Ofcourse, it might have something to do with the fact that sometimes I can put up with non-spectacular video performance (when I get totally bored reconfiguring XFree86 ), but still Linux supports more machines out of the box than windows from what I have seen- assuming that each different motherboard/cards etc are given equal weightage irrespective of how many of them get sold.

The experience is not different for myy friends either.

Re:This is a great sign

[jsebrech]

Sure some things might not work, but I haven't run into anything in the past 2-3 years that I couldn't get working in linux although setting up my ATI card was a real pain.

Try cheap webcams. The majority don't work in linux. And it's only in the last 6 months that the nvidia driver has been stable enough that it didn't nuke my X within 5 minutes when I watch tv and browse the web at the same time. Still, I agree hardware support is becoming acceptable.

Re:This is a great sign

[phasm42]

Linux is updated much more frequently than Windows, and due to lack of mfr support, usually has more "generic" drivers that aren't brand specific. Linux distributions rarely have to license drivers to include, but because Windows's drivers are closed-source and more limited in their distribution, it may be more difficult to get permission to distribute them (although you'd think that companies would want this), or maybe the situation is that MS doesn't want to distribute drivers it hasn't certified. New versions of Windows don't come out as often, but it's been my experience that most popular hardware is usually supported by a new version of Windows at the time of release, and because mfr support for Windows is strong, the drivers can be installed straight away quite easily. By screwing with the INF files in a driver, sometimes you can force a driver to install on hardware that's not quite a match, but this isn't always the case. I haven't had very good luck with Linux and video/monitor setup, especially when asked to identify precisely what video card I have and what refresh rates my monitor supports, but this usually isn't much of a concern because I rarely if ever use the GUI anyway.

Re:This is a great sign

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using the nvidia driver for a few years now, maybe since I was a senior in high school like 3 years ago, never had any issues with it. And I said some things might not work, talking about web cams since I know a lot don't work.

SCO

[Youssef Adnan]

Here goes my karma: Are you sure this code doesn't belong to SCO? I mean, we all know that all open source projects belong to them but we're hiding it. :)

Thanks, Intel...

[MsGeek]

I'm impressed. A real open-source driver from a major company...this shames the NVidias and the Lucents of the world who give stupid excuses for their closed-source drivers.

Looks like I'm going to be sniffing around for a refurbed IBM T41 ThinkPad with Centrino tech in the future.

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[Iscariot_]

this shames the NVidias and the Lucents of the world who give stupid excuses for their closed-source drivers.

Better than no driver at all...

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[DAldredge]

The firmware is CLOSED SOURCE, just like the Nvidia driver module.

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[/dev/trash]

Read the article.....it's not really there yet.

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel have released their drivers under OSS licences before now. I believe the current eepro10/100/1000 NIC drivers are authored by Intel themselves.

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[dave420]

Stupid excuses like "this cost us millions to produce, so we're not going to give the code away to you and our competitors, which would eventually cause us to lose so much revenue we'd not be able to make any more cards/drivers for you at all"?

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[Florian Weimer]

I'm impressed. A real open-source driver from a major company...

You haven't browsed the Linux source code lately, have you?

There are at least two other Intel drivers in them.

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[be-fan]

And to reiterate --- an OpenGL driver is an order of magnitude more complex than a network driver! NVIDIA open-sourcing their OpenGL driver would be the equivilent of Microsoft open-sourcing Direct3D!

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[Just Some Guy]

Barely. I'd pine for the closed NVidia driver if I were a gamer (I still wouldn't use it, but I'd at least be tempted). For 2d stuff, XFree's 'nv' driver is fast, rock solid, and works out of the box - and it's Free.

Closed source drivers are evil, and are in fact what triggered RMS to begin the Free Software movement. They encourage complacency while giving nothing.

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[Unregistered]

this shames the NVidias and the Lucents of the world who give stupid excuses for their closed-source drivers.

Quit bitching. IICRC, NVidia doesn't own all the code in their drivers and anyway, why should they be forced to disclose stuff they consider a trade secret? They provide solid, working drivers for an OS used by like 1% of the desktop market. That's pretty impressive, imo.

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[Jeffrey Baker]

Intel makes $0 from the sale of their drivers. Also the marginal cost to produce a Linux driver when you already have 1) a Windows driver, and 2) a staff of Linux hackers is very much lower than "millions of dollars". However, the marginal cost of sales of Intel Centrino laptops to Linux users will be several hundred dollars each.

The economics are pretty simple. Probably some large client like Goldman Sachs or a similarly sized outfit wants to run Linux on laptops and told Intel to get their act together.

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[sxpert]

the firmware is closed source because this is rendered compulsory by the military. furthermore, the firmware runs INSIDE THE CARD, which is similar to the software that runs your printer.

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[Tore S B]

...this shames the NVidias and ...

Well, nVidia has a good reason - they use proprietary algorithms lisenced from companies who makes them for a living. Their lisence disallows them from releasing the source. Thus, it is not a stupid excuse. Their hands are really tied. Intel also had some completely valid concerns that an Open-Source driver would allow their chip to tune to frequencies out of the legal WLAN band, and at signal strengths way higher than the legal limit, to name a few.

Luckily, Intel (justly IMO) judged that the competitive advantages of Linux support outweighed those risks.

-tsb

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[DAldredge]

Kind of like the way the NVidia code runs on the NVxx GPU? It is the samn thing.

I miss the old /. . Perhaps I should leave.

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[Zakabog]

Yeah for shame NVidia for taking your time to support linux, how dare you do that. Don't ever do it again! As much as I love your driver, and how amazingly easy it is to insall, and how great it works in linux, don't EVER do that again! YOU BASTARDS! How dare you corrupt us with some closed source driver! Even though you probably can't open source the driver because it might contain trade secrets or liscensed materials that you're not allowed to show us, but still! Don't you dare make a closed source driver for linux again! Now take your closed source driver away from us and go! We don't care that you're sticking your neck out hoping people will actually buy the cards for the linux support since you actually used your own money to pay your codders to write this thing!

Ok now that I'm done sounding like an idiot I can be serious, I hate when people complain about NVidia's closed source driver. So it's closed source? Big deal? It's not something they sell, it's free, it's available on their website to anyone who wants it. Even if you have 50 ATI cards and 0 NVidia cards, they don't care, it's still free for you. They actually had to pay money to get that driver out to linux in the first place, if it wasn't for that driver, would their be any new games running in linux (UT 2003, 2004, Doom 3 when it comes out) Probably not since there wouldn't be many good cards out there to run these games. Other than ATI and NVidia what else is out their that you can actually buy easily, that runs on linux? The ATI driver is also closed source, and it's so hard to install and get working. I think the NVidia driver's done more for the linux gaming community than any open source software, well except wine, but isn't winex closed source and available only to subscribers? Also, doesn't wine, which would be the open source free one, run way less games than winex?

And not so long ago (October, 2003) I upgraded my video card, I bought one ATI card for my main computer, and figured I should get another card for my server, of course I went right to the nvidia cards because they have great linux support. I think because of their driver more companies would support linux since a lot of gamers would buy NVidia cards just for the linux support. I don't think I'd buy anything else just for linux support (except maybe a CF card reader with USB 2.0 but that's only cause I'd need it to run on my laptop so I can upload pictures wherever I am.)

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[archeopterix]

Stupid excuses like "this cost us millions to produce, so we're not going to give the code away to you and our competitors, which would eventually cause us to lose so much revenue we'd not be able to make any more cards/drivers for you at all"?

While I wouldn't go so far as to call this excuse "stupid", it is certaintly far from "convincing".

"This cost us millions to produce" doesn't imply "we'll lose something by disclosing it". How exactly would this cause losses? By reducing sales? Perhaps, if the drivers weren't free to start with.

By giving away some knowledge that would be unobtainable without the drivers' source? C'mon, the high-tech companies have the technology to reverse-engineer the card firmware and probably most of the integrated circuits - some puny drivers that don't even require soldering to obtain are no match for them.

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel has stated that they are treating Linux as a "Tier 1" platform -- same support as Windows. Only that the Centrino wireless was a bit of a fuckup on their part.

Intel is also responsible for Linux ACPI, EFI, and all of the modern Intel chipset support -- including AGP, SATA, etc, and NIC drivers. I think they also do the XFree drivers for their graphics chipsets.

Compare this to NVidia (100% binary) or VIA/SIS/etc (reverse engineering by Linux devs, many bugs), and Intel is really THE top notch Linux hardware vendor. Too bad they get flamed so hard by the AMD fanboy cross-over crowd.

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[realnowhereman]

This is a great argument - except for one thing. Why can't they release all of their code? If there is somebody else's code in there that has to be binary only why can't THOSE be the parts that are binary only? A couple of ".o" files in a mass of ".c" files named "sgi.o", "ms.o", "sun.o", etc to hide the non-disclosable binary bits. At the very least the bugs in the rest of it could be hunted down and squashed. It's just an excuse, they don't want to release it. I'd rather they said so than blame it on some other company.

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[jmorris42]

> NVidia doesn't own all the code in their drivers

And their reason for not releasing their HARDWARE specs would be what exactly?

Could it be that they understand all too well that were they to tell us how their stuff works the X hackers would be beating their framerates within a year?

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[Fluffy the Cat]

The nvidia binary code is almost the entirity of the driver, and mostly runs on the host CPU. If it was just GPU firmware, you'd be able to use the driver on PPC or Alpha.

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[mark_lybarger]

that's just plain wrong. ATI does release specs to their hardware, and the X "hackers" produce lack luster drivers that can lock up an entire box. perhaps it's from faulty specs, but still.

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[dave420]

Yes, they make $0 from the sale of their drivers. They do, however make money from the sale of the hardware they produce. If their competitors can use the drivers they release to boost their products development/sales, intel loses money on hardware sales. That's the real economics of the situation, and as you can see, it's in Intel's (and every other hardware manufacturer who's leading the market) best interests to keep closed source exactly that - closed.

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[dave420]

The drivers are free, but if a competitor got their hands on the code, they can use that development and "stand on the shoulders of giants" and further their own products enough to play Intel's game. That smaller manufacturer would be in a real position to take sales away from Intel, which obviously Intel doesn't want. That's what's going on here. With most manufacturers (nVidia, Intel (for their modems), etc.) binary drivers are free as in beer, not speech. That's the main difference. If the contents got out, they could lose sales. If they keep the drivers closed-source and their contents get out, they have a party they can sue to recover costs. They kiss goodbye to that possibility if they release the drivers openly.

They're trying to do the right thing, yet they still get shat on. Go figure.

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[Jeffrey Baker]

Please, it is extremely difficult to produce and market a wireless chipset. Only a handful of very sophisticated companies can do so, and those that can have already done so. Intel's driver has boring crap like ring buffers and queues. It doesn't have ths secret sauce. Take a look for yourself.

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[dinivin]

Hahahah... I threw my nVidia card out after four releases of their drivers locked up my machines. Replaced it with a Radeon 8500, using open source drivers, and have had not a single stability issue.

Dinivin

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[13Echo]

Most of those "proprietary algorithms" are not essential to getting quality 3D support for most applications. Look at ATI's DRI drivers. Most of their Radeon lineup works very well with the DRI drivers. Only the recent cores do not have DRI support (in favor of closed source drivers). They gave programming documentation to the project, and the drivers have been very high-quality so far, in spite of missing a few features like S3TC (which can be implemented with a patch - probably legally).

Their hands are not tied from simply allowing the community to write quality drivers with slightly crippled 3D features. Basic 3D functionality isn't going to cost them a dime. In fact, the work that would go into it could help them to improve their closed drivers as well.

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[dinivin]

That's still a load of BS. Video card manufacturers have plans laid out years ahead of time. When nVidia purchased all the 3dfx IP, it took them two years to incorporate any of it into their own product line. By that time, the entire industry had moved on. So it's hardly realistic to believe that a 3D manufacturer is going to be able to look at the specifications for a competitors current product, and produce anything with that learned knowledge in a competitive time frame.

Dinivin

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[slux]

Is it really? There being a non-free driver strongly discourages any hacker to implement a free software (or open source if that's your thing) driver.

Ironically, who this hurts most are the *BSD folks. No 3D acceleration for them on NVidia cards since there are only proprietary drivers that work with Linux.

In the long run it has some very dark implications for the Linux users also, though. Some might (myself included) be unhappy about not being able to run an operating system based completely on free software ie. GNU/Linux but it doesn't end just there. Linus and the other kernel developers are losing quality control of the kernel with these proprietary drivers. That is why they also refuse to investigate any problems reported while using them and introduced the concept of "tainting" the kernel with non-GPL binary modules.

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[Tore S B]

True, but the nVidia driver needs to be fast. Mainly because some magazines have started benchmarking using Linux.

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[Monkeybaister]

Please get a clue.

Have you looked at the patch? It's 250KB, 8800 lines, which includes documentation, copyright headers for every file, and all the diff commands.

Knowledgeable people have said before that a driver does not tell anything about how to make the hardware. It's still going to cost tons of money to develop a chip that's compatible with someone else's. Only a graphics card company could have an excuse since the drivers have become so complex. And even the DRI people have said that a company could either spend millions on reverse engineering or millions on developing their own card that wouldn't be behind the competition by the huge amount of time to reverse engineer such a complex piece of silicon.

Sure, it theoretically gives the competition a help, but practically it actually does very little.

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[darkmeridian]

Right. If nvidia releases a GPLed driver, then what is to prevent ATI from using it to improve their own drivers? I mean, the greatest difference in performance between the products of these companies is their drivers. Nvidia is on-time drivers that are really fast and don't crash.

This pressure does not exist for wireless cards, for the most part. Gamers are early adopters and drive the market for the maximum performance.

Someone modded my post for ndiswrapper as a troll. I wonder why. It does work really well. Could someone care to explain?

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[13Echo]

Other than ATI and NVidia what else is out their that you can actually buy easily, that runs on linux?

Not that I disagree with you or anything, but I just want to note... PowerVR has had drivers for years now. XGI just released drivers for their Volari cards as well. Most other chips have opensource drivers.

Honestly though, one could question PowerVR's future on Linux or even the PC in general, since they've not had anyone license technology for their PC tech designs for several years. It's also looking like they will never release driver for a kernel above 2.6. XGI, on the other hand, seems to have a problem with low quality drivers on Windows (according to reviews). I can't speak for their Linux drivers though. Their cards are also very difficult to find in some parts of the world. In regards to the DRI supported hardware - much of it is aging. Matrox won't release information about Parhelia, even though the older cores are well supported. SIS has ignored Linux for the Xabre line, though the older cores work alright. Intel's graphics chips are well supported, and DRI has fully functional drivers.

Gernerally, where performance matters, you'll be able to find usable drivers from either nVidia or ATI. Some users have had problems with drivers from both sites, though most of it is error in user configuration. Others have had great success with ATI or nVidia. My Radeon 9500 PRO is great on Linux. So, where performance counts, those are the only two vendors that really matter.

In regards to the other hardware vendors, most of the chips have support through DRI. So, to answer your question, there aren't many chips out there that *don't* have Linux support. Most of them work quite easily by means of the DRI drivers.

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[pentalive]

I thought bianry only drivers could be released as kernel modules, without disclosing source.. If so then there is no
excuse for a hardware mfg to not support linux.

They don't want to spend the time?

They could hire a linux save programmer on Non Disclosure, or perhaps one of us could volunteer with the understanding that while the module would be offered binary only(that is not "free as in speach"), it would still be "free as in beer"

Would any of us with the programming ability and the proper knowlege set step up to the plate in those curcumstances?

If I had the programming knowledge I would.

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[bhtooefr]

Actually, I've found the nvidia driver to be MUCH faster, even in KDE, than nv. Maybe it's because I've got an old slow box (PMMX233), and the acceleration seems to speed it up a big deal... I installed the drivers because 1fps in BZFlag wasn't my cup of tea.

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[Etyenne]

How would releasing the source to a drivers they give away with their hardware make them lose revenue ?

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[Etyenne]

If their competitors can use the drivers they release to boost their products development/sales ... [snip]

How would a competitor "use the drivers they release to boost their products development/sales" ?

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[13Echo]

Agreed, but I tend to think that any magazine that knew anything about benchmarking on Linux would be using the fastest driver in the first place. They normally do use the best driver that is available on Windows. Often, they will even use "leaked" Detonators when testing a piece of hardware. Any reasonably intelligent reviewer would probably do the same thing on Linux - or even test it with both sets.

One such example is this comparison, which outlines the pros and cons of the various drivers available for ATI cores on Linux. One might find it interesting that some of the alternatives offer better performance than ATI's drivers in some instances.

http://homepage.hispeed.ch/rscheidegger/atilinux_o ct03/ati_linux_comp_oct03.html

From here, you will see that it is not entirely unlikely that an open source implementation of nVidias drivers could offer nVidia some insight into how to make their drivers perform better on Linux. I suspect that this will help ATI improve their OpenGL support across each supported, assuming they take this stuff seriously. I'd actually be seriously interested in buying some XIG Summit drivers, if they could only support the R300 cores (not likely right now since the programming docs aren't available).

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[Etyenne]

The drivers are free, but if a competitor got their hands on the code, they can use that development and "stand on the shoulders of giants" and further their own products enough to play Intel's game.

How ?

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[spitzak]

We all know the closed-source driver is better. But it is not better *because* it is closed source. Some argue that it would be even better open-source because people would fix it, but even if nothing was changed, it would be exactly the same open-source.

The argument is that Intel might demonstrate that releasing the source for something does not cause you to go out of business tomorrow.

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[Trelane]

No, but thanks for trying.

ATI provides information to the X hackers for older cards. Interestingly enough, recent older cards (Radeon 7400? 7500? Somewhere in there) with Free drivers outperform more recent ATI cards with ATI binary drivers, IIRC.

OTOH, NVidia doesn't release any specs, and their cards perform danged fast under Linux.

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[Anonymous Coward]

nv doesn't work at all for the FX chipsets -- you have to use the SVGA driver (ugh) if you want keep your kernel untainted.

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[lakeland]

No, nv's 2d support is rock solid and works out of the box, but it aint fast.

You won't believe how annoying it is to upgrade your kernel and on reboot be dumped into text mode because of the nvidia driver. However, every every time I go back to nv because I'm pissed at nvidia, I get too frustrated by how slow nv is.

So, I'm back to using nvidia, and every time I upgrade my kernel I have to compile three seperate drivers on reboot to have things work again! (nvidia, vmware, and at76c503c.sf.net -- gpl but not in the stock kernel).

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[gnu-generation-one]

"[closed-source drivers] are better than no driver at all..."

Not really.

(Since communism is better than no government at all, perhaps we should force people to use it?)

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Stupid excuses like "this cost us millions to produce, so we're not going to give the code away to you and our competitors, which would eventually cause us to lose so much revenue we'd not be able to make any more cards/drivers for you at all"?"

Howabout "thanks for paying $800 for a graphics card but sorry, we're not going to tell you how to interface it to your system"

Gonna get them lots of customers in the future I bet...

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[jmorris42]

Perhaps, but I refuse to depend on closed software for anything important and there isn't much more important on a desktop system than reliable and stable video. Between my home desktop and work supplied laptop I have exactly ONE semi-closed driver, an slmodem that I rarely use and that is only because you can't buy a laptop with a truly supported winmodem from anywhere I'm aware of. There isn't much other closed software either except for a couple of games which aren't what I'd call important components.

Yes that did require specing a Cisco 350 miniPCI wireless instead of the default Centrino crap but unless you are planning to run the default OS as shipped it is always the buyers duty to run down the hardware compatibility details before issuing the purchase order. And yes that implies that any vendor who can't/won't supply the sort of details information needed for that analysis during the pre-sales phase shouldn't be on your list of vendors.

btw, you do have to dig a bit for the drivers for a Cisco 350, but there are 100% GPL drivers that support all features of the card, including proper recovery from suspend, output power control and iwconfig support. Dag Wier's excellent repository had a ready to build srpm for RHEL3 & clones, RH9, etc.

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[Trelane]

I loves my Cisco AIR-352PCM. It's truly a beautiful card.

That said, the cisco builtin wasn't an option on my laptop (dell inspiron 8600). I went with the one that had the highest probability of giving me a GPLed driver.

Thank goodness Intel finally is getting around to releasing something; I was getting really, really hacked off.

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[el-spectre]

The whole "evil" schtick is a bunch of crap.

Company X produces some hardware. if/when there is enough market for support in a minority OS like linux, they may do so. And they get our (linux fans) business. If they don't, they dont. It's an economic decision, no more or less.

Just because they don't subscribe to a given philosophy doesn't make their product bad.

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[jmorris42]

I guess throwing money at a vendor and praying that someday it actually works is one way to buy hardware..... but it isn't the one I use. I'm a bit more of a hardass, I expect to be able to get it up and into production with a minimum of bother.

You see, we actually USE linux where I work, it isn't something I'm playing with at home. Telling the boss that her new laptop might work right by next year is the sort of thing that would be remembered come performance evaluation time. Same goes for my own work machine. I don't run Sid or Fedora on it, because it has to actually WORK; saying "Sorry, couldn't do that today, the latest GNOME beta has a key app hosed up right now." doesn't cut it. I do usually try to be the sacrificial animal when testing new products though, because even with careful research St. Murphy is still the patron saint of computers.

And yes I once did have to put a new laptop into the hands of an end user with a PCCard modem because of a unexpected change in winmodem chipsets. Point being that it was an unexpected exception that happened despite my best efforts to prevent it.

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[alienw]

That is not so for NVidia's video cards, however. They say that the driver is just as important as the GPU chip, and an open-source driver would give competitors a definite advantage. I am sure they would steal whatever source they wanted, since it's pretty much impossible to recognize small pieces of source code after it has been compiled.

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[Trelane]

I guess throwing money at a vendor and praying that someday it actually works is one way to buy hardware..... but it isn't the one I use. I'm a bit more of a hardass, I expect to be able to get it up and into production with a minimum of bother.

Indeed. It was more along the lines of finding the local minimum of evil. :) I could either choose Intel, which had made rumblings about a Linux native driver, or Broadcom, which TMK hadn't even released rumors. Those are the options Dell gave me, having tried and failed to get a laptop meeting my specs from at least 3-4 other vendors.

You see, we actually USE linux where I work, it isn't something I'm playing with at home.

Well, I actually USE linux too (sorry; your posting got my dander up). Not just at home, but everywhere, and I try to encourage its uptake and use wherever and whenever I can (actually, I have developed a reputation for being quite the Linux Zealot).

I have three licenses for Windows, one from before I used Linux ('98 or so), one from my old laptop, and one from my new laptop, since I couldn't get what I wanted from a Linux vendor (I tried QLI, and things were really really bad with them). I finally tried the mainstream vendors and fared little better. It truly sucks to try and be picky about what you're buying if you want linux too.

Of those three licenses, zero are installed. OTOH, I currently have 7 computers running. They all run Linux. At work, we have a Beowulf cluster of Linux boxen.

BTW, who do you recommend for purchasing Linux laptops? Whever I'm in the market for one again, I'm gonna make another go of it. It's so frustrating....

That said, I hope to have some stuff released soon which will aid linux on laptops greatly (IMHO; software only, I'm afraid; not much help on the vendor front). You may be interested in it--look for the Vilsack Governor and Absolute Power. (CPU governor and corresponding gnome applet). After that will be profiles, so that I can stop dinking with scripts and put a nice shiny gui interface on a solid backend system. I'll try to hook it into D-BUS, so that others can extend off of it.

So, conclusion:
I'm trying to support Linux how I can with my dollars, with my community-building efforts, and with my computer skills. I use linux every day exclusively; I am not merely toying around with it, as you seemed to imply with your choice of capitalization.

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[jmorris42]

> BTW, who do you recommend for purchasing Linux laptops?

Go Big Blue. The religion hasn't worked it's way all the way through the organization, especially with Thinkpads, but you can get working hardware from them. They will default to the Centrino for wireless but offer two other choices, one of which is the Cisco. Their winmodems have readily available drivers and they are currently using ATI Radeons which the open source X server instantly identifies and works with in 2D & 3D. Even the firewire and CF card ports work with zero effort.

Add in the thinkpad utilities and you have easy access to a wealth of vital information such as docking status, lid state and presence of an external monitor which makes scripting profiles easy.

There is no longer an excuse for accepting hardware with questionable driver support from uncaring vendors. So long as you grumble yet still place the order, Dell won't change. Just how much effort would it take to add one more PCI id to the whitelist of acceptable MiniPCI cards? It is long since past time we put aside our Linux Zealot/enthusiast mindset where we didn't expect vendors to give us the time of day and started expecting vendors to treat us like CUSTOMERS.

Although I can't really say nice things about IBM's service..... the last two hardware failures were not resolved well at all.

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[Jeffrey Baker]

I have no doubt that is true. But, that means NVidia is offering two products: a hardware graphics accellerator and a driver. With open source drivers all drivers would converge on the same level of quality, and the graphics card manufacturers would be left with only the hardware product. This might be good for both the manufacturers and the customers/users.

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[Anonymous Coward]

Using the nv driver, open an xterm.

Press backspace.

Witness the 2-second horror that is instantaneous with the nvidia driver!

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[Just Some Guy]

Ok, I opened a xterm and hit backspace. What am I supposed to be seeing?

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[Nurf]

The drivers are free, but if a competitor got their hands on the code, they can use that development and "stand on the shoulders of giants" and further their own products enough to play Intel's game. That smaller manufacturer would be in a real position to take sales away from Intel, which obviously Intel doesn't want. That's what's going on here.

Sorry. I make electronics hardware for a living, and you are very wrong. Only in the most extreme of circumstances can releasing open software drivers for your devices help your competitors.

Typically, releasing source helps your friends far more than your enemies. Interfacing to a device is harder than copying useful ideas out of its implementation. Typically, copying useful bits is unnecessary anyway, because it is very rare that your competitor doesn't know exactly how you did something just from their own experience.

I get paid to fix or improve other people's hardware and firmware, among other things. So far, I have yet to see something in the firmware that I couldn't deduce from simply watching the device work for ten minutes. Sometimes I can diagnose hardware problems from doing the same. This stuff really isn't that hard - reality constrains your approaches to most problems, so reverse engineering is just a matter of doing some trivial tests to see which approach was used.

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[bhtooefr]

How is this redundant, when I'm the first reply to the parent saying anything about nv vs. nvidia? I was providing anecdotal evidence that the xfree86 nv driver might not be so speedy.

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you missed it I said "what else is out their that you can actually buy easily" meaning, what can you go to a best buy and purchase? Or what else would come with your computer from gateway or dell?

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[be-fan]

That argument makes no sense. Since the drivers would be open source, they could roll back those changes. Driver quality plays a big role in the 3D card market, and having faster drivers would then help them sell *more* hardware, and it would be a net win for them.

The simple fact of the matter is that the DRI folks have been given the specs to ATI hardware (R100 and R200) and have not been able to come up with drivers that are any more than drastically inferior to the ATI or XiG ones. That's especially sad considering that ATI's Linux binary drivers are quite a bit worse than their Windows binary drivers!

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[bronaugh]

Err, pardon me, but that is not my experience. My experience is that the DRI drivers for r100, r200, mach64 aka Rage Pro, and i830 hardware are quite solid. I know performance for r100 and r200 isn't up to what the Windows drivers are; explanation for this below. Explanation for them getting boned by XiG is a bit more difficult; however, I do know that they continue to improve the code (I track the dri-devel mailing list). What is interesting, though, is that XiG's stuff beats out ATI's own in the majority of cases. Good on XiG :)

The problem with saying that they are slower is that in truth, they weren't provided with full specs. They don't have specs for the HyperZ technology -- which means they can't make use of the hardware's ability to do Z buffer clears in one op code, for instance. I'm still hella glad they have what they have, though -- the r200 driver is still the fastest and most featureful opensource 3D driver on Linux.

I put my money where my mouth is; I bought myself a 128M Radeon 9000 recently rather than buying an nVidia card. I got tired of the crashing, disgusting power consumption, and fan noise of nVidia's offerings. I simply wanted a really solid video card for some 3D and a lot of 2D that supported DVI and was going to last for a while. Basically, a high tech video card for a code monkey :)

Anyhow, my 2c on the issue.

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[crazyhussar]

I have to agree. About 6 months ago, I purchased an IBM R40. It was a bit cheaper than the T* line, light enough to carry to class every day (5.5lb), and good battery time(6+ hours). The ACPI even works pretty well with the more recent kernels (cpu throttling, performance profiles, processor temp, battery state, ect).

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[MartinG]

Better than no driver at all...

And I suppose working as a slave is better than not working at all. You might not have any freedom, but at least you get food, right?

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[be-fan]

I'm not saying that the ATI drivers aren't solid and usable. I'm saying that they're not good *3D* drivers. The whole point of a 3D card is to run 3D code, fast. The DRI drivers do not do that. Thus, the DRI people have not proven they could do better drivers than ATI.

In my experience, the NVIDIA drivers, though they may be binary-only, *do* do that. I've used the NVIDIA drivers variously on a Riva TNT, GeForce2 MX, and GeForce4 Go, and I've never had a stability issue with any of them. In the benchmarks, they are every bit as fast as the Windows drivers. Certainly, ILM thinks highly enough of them to run them on their 3D workstations! They do what a 3D driver is supposed to do --- run 3D code fast.

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[alienw]

OK, think about it. You and I have equal amounts of money. I spend half of my money developing the GPU, and half developing drivers, and release them as open-source. You spend 80% developing the GPU, and 20% developing the drivers because you can use whatever optimization techniques you found in my drivers to save a bunch of money. You will have a better GPU and probably better drivers. Therefore, is it to my advantage to release drivers as open-source?

Open Source Driver + Firmware

[alex_tibbles]

Is this a full driver or is the firmware a subtle way of making a closed-source driver?

(Honest question)

Re:Open Source Driver + Firmware

[wangmaster]

I think it's a little of both. The firmware portion still hides alot of what the hardware does, but, since the driver is entirely opensource, at least you know what the kernel portion is doing. It's one step closer to opensource than NVidia, but I don't think it's 100% there (still, it's great). I've been using the prism54 drivers with the miniPCI 54G card I bought and they do the same thing, opensource driver, closed firmware.

Re:Open Source Driver + Firmware

[vranash]

Given the supposed lack of foresight in their hardware design that most wlan vendors have taken recently (using basically 'soft wlan' cards), it is probably more akin to a 'partially closed driver', in that you probably won't have access to the channel frequencies, adding new network modes (master, monitor, etc). HOWEVER given that, it should allow future patching to the kernel side of the driver to support whatever future interface changes happen to ensure the card won't suddenly become useless.

IMHO, this is what all wlan dealers should be doing... if you can't give direct access to the hardware due to possible legal/FCC constraints, then you should have firmware to handle the interfacing so that you can at least release firmware interface specs, and hopefully be able to cut down on cross development costs by having your firmware patches enhance both linux and windows functionality while stomping out mutual bugs.

Re:Open Source Driver + Firmware

[alex_tibbles]

to answer my own question (partly):
"As the firmware is licensed under a restricted use license, it can not be included within the kernel sources. To enable the IPW2100 you will need a firmware image to load into the wireless NIC's processors." From http://ipw2100.sourceforge.net/README.ipw2100.
And look at the firmware license!

Re:Open Source Driver + Firmware

[alex_tibbles]

Thanks for that.
I agree that it's clearly better to have a large chunk of the driver open-source (even if, as it seems, it did not come from the vendor). Does intel publish the interface to the firmware?

Re:Open Source Driver + Firmware

[alex_tibbles]

perhaps it does come from the vendor

Re:Open Source Driver + Firmware

[Anonymous Coward]

It's FREE SOFTWARE, not open source software!

And this isn't even this so-called 'open-source' software: it's oppressive closed-source software which would taint my GNU/Linux kernel (note that there is no driver for GNU/Hurd).

Well, I'm not going to use this software.
Also I have no centrino laptop.

Re:Open Source Driver + Firmware

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux already contains firmware blobs for things like SCSI cards and CPU microcode.

Most Linux developers are fine with this -- you have to draw the line between software and hardware somewhere, and the firmware (or BIOS) interface seems like a logical place to do it.

Re:Open Source Driver + Firmware

[david.given]

Is this a full driver or is the firmware a subtle way of making a closed-source driver?

That's a rather more complicated question than you might think.

The way most wireless cards work is that there's some radio hardware, hooked up to a microprocessor on the card that handles the low-level 802.11 frames, and some host software that talks to the microprocessor.

The microprocessor --- which tends to be an embedded ARM, these days --- runs a tiny nearly-an-operating-system out of flash or RAM. If RAM, then you need to download the microprocessor's code when you power up the card. That's the firmware.

This has a number of advantages: it means that the crucial, real-time processing is done with a custom processor that doesn't have to worry about running user code; it means that the vendor can change the hardware without having to change the driver, because the driver's just talking to a well-defined interface provided by the microprocessor; and it means that it's much easier to make cross-platform drivers.

It also means that the vendor can hide stuff in the firmware that they really, really don't want the user to play with. Such as the power, channel and timing settings that are mandated by the FCC.

I don't know if there are any wireless vendors out there who actually release source code to their firmware. (I'd be interested to find out if there are.) Which means that the answer to your question is both yes and no: the firmware's not open source, but the driver is.

Re:Open Source Driver + Firmware

[Fluffy the Cat]

Not really. Most hardware nowadays contains firmware (modern wireless cards are often just ARM cores attached to a radio transmitter), but in many cases it's in ROM or flash and you've never noticed. Older wireless cards with entirely open drivers (such as the orinocos) had similar quantities of firmware, but the cards shipped with it in flash. Requiring it to be loaded by the OS makes hardware implementation slightly easier, and you can upgrade the firmware along with the drivers without involving potentially risky reflashing.

Would you consider Linux closed-source because on most hardware it requires a closed-source BIOS or firmware in order to boot?

(Yes, I know about LinuxBIOS. It supports a subset of x86 hardware)

Re:Open Source Driver + Firmware

[alex_tibbles]

Thanks for info.

In answer to your question: it depends. In the case of current hardware, no. If the 'driver' were simply a trivial wrapper around the firmware, then I would consider that closed-source but in name.

BTW, LinuxBIOS does not do that much. See (PDF) The Linux BIOS, page 4: five steps: protected mode setup, DRAM setup, transition to C, mainboard fixup, kernel unzip and jump.

Re:Open Source Driver + Firmware

[psp]

It works exactly like my D-Linux DWL-650+ (with Texas Instruments chipset). It uploads the exact same firmware image as the windows driver does. In my opinion this is as good (or bad) as having the firmware in flashrom (like for example video cards).

Most people don't complain about that NVidia hasn't released the firmware source for their video cards, and I don't see any reason to complain about this.

Re:Open Source Driver + Firmware

[CaptnMArk]

I agree. I don't see a problem with binary only firmware as long as it works (preferably has a well specified interface) and can be freely distributed by linux distributions.

No WEP

[gspr]

WEP currently no support
Notice how WEP support is not yet done.

Re:No WEP

[michich]

WEP is weak. Use OpenVPN if you can.

Re:No WEP

[Anonymous Coward]

No WEP is still bad. You should use both.

I make sure all the screens on my house are tied down good. Screens aren't much security, but the one time my house was broken into, they only tried the windows where they could open the screens without cutting them (stupid kids). They finally kicked down a door.

Don't assume all your attackers are really smart. WEP will slow them down at the minimum.

Re:No WEP

[Just Some Guy]

Wanna explain that to my CIO who dictates WEP?

OK, I don't actually have a CIO, but that's to illustrate my point. I'd say that the majority of people using wireless in the first place do have usage policies in place, and I imagine that the bulk of those require WEP to join the WLAN.

Re:No WEP

[Lukey Boy]

If you're in a corporate environment that actually allows access to anything via a wireless LAN and rely on WEP, then you have much bigger problems with your organization. Seriously - WEP is pathetic. Use a VPN. In my case I tunnel everything through SSH (web, IMAP, SMTP, etc).

Re:No WEP

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they're tired of wardriving Kazaa users mooching their bandwidth, and use WEP to say "this is not a public hotspot", and something better for real security.

Sure, they could set the SSID to "KEEP OUT!!!", but that's easy for the dishonest to ignore.

Re:No WEP

[Lukey Boy]

No no, you misunderstand - you block everything coming from the wireless access point except the VPN host/IP address combination. Nothing gets through the network without using the VPN.

Re:No WEP

[Just Some Guy]

That's like saying that passwords are pointless because they can be broken.

Using WEP as the sole security on your WLAN is bad. Using it as an additional layer of security is perfectly reasonable and recommended.

Re:No WEP

[Lukey Boy]

Yes, agreed. The security provided by WEP may be poor, but it is better than nothing and every little bit counts.

Hardly Intel...

[damieng]

I fail to see how "Finally Intel has made their different announcements about Linux support for the WLAN part of the Centrino technology become true."

when the SourceForge web site clearly states in the first paragraph.

"This project was created to enable support for the Intel PRO/Wireless 2100 (IPW2100) mini PCI adapter. This project is intended to be a community effort as much as is possible given some working constraints (mainly, no HW documentation is available)"

Sounds like Intel haven't helped at all and some enterprising folks have done their own. Kudos to them, shame on Intel.

And shame on Werner and Timothy for getting basic cursory facts right. Unless of course the SF website is failing to give credit to Intel.

Re:Hardly Intel...

[wangmaster]

That's like saying ACPI for linux isn't an intel contribution because it's a sourceforge project. Take a look at the README for the driver. The primary contact for this is James P. Ketrenos who appears to be an Intel employee.

Re:Hardly Intel...

[damieng]

No, it's nothing to do with being hosted on sourceforge.

It's entirely to do with the words "community effort " and "no HW documentation".

Re:Hardly Intel...

[jojo80]

Contact Info

If you have any questions, concerns, etc. please email James Ketrenos.

That's what it says on the "Validation" page. James Ketrenos apparently works at Intel, so I guess, Intel *does* help.

Re:Hardly Intel...

[Otter]

That's like saying ACPI for linux isn't an intel contribution because it's a sourceforge project.

Oh, is that why I can't get my Athlon to power off with any kernel after 2.4.20?

Re:Hardly Intel...

[javatips]

My first reaction was the same as yours... But if you browse at the end of the page and hover your mouse on the maintainer name, you'll see that he has an Intel e-mail address.

So yes Intel is, kind of, supporting Linux driver for the Centrino chip as the pay the guy...

However, I don't beleive this is a priority for them. If it was so, they would have released something that is fully functional... What it seems to me is that they are paying one guy to do it and hope the OS community will jump in and help them out! I don't see any real corporate backing behind this project.

Re:Hardly Intel...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, this is endorsed and provided by Intel. Intel is pretty strict about the use of their company email addresses and names. Even posting on usenet using your Intel email address is not allowed unless you either give a disclaimer that your post is not official Intel communication or you get approval from the legal department and your manager. Since this SF project uses an Intel email address, but there is no disclaimer, it is safe to assume it is endorsed by Intel.

Re:Hardly Intel...

[Anonymous Coward]

There's already a ton of OSS drivers where there's no publically available hardware documentation -- either the mfg released the driver or gave the docs to 1 or 2 Linux devs under NDA.

Re:Hardly Intel...

[Fluffy the Cat]

ACPI offers better power saving on laptops than APM does, and many modern laptops don't have any APM support at all.

Re:Hardly Intel...

[13Echo]

Just load the APM module and be done with it.

It's this easy... Put:

"modprobe apm"

In your startup script. Some distributions, like Slackware, leave it disabled by default. It has nothing to do with your Athlon.

Re:Hardly Intel...

[headqtrs]

Looks like a private effort from an Intel employee (who has access to the specs) that is being tolerated by Intel.

Re:Hardly Intel...

[Anonymous Coward]

What use is all of that to him when ACPI doesn't even work properly in the first place?

if only....

[thedude13]

broadcom would follow intel's lead and release a linux driver. while driverloader and ndiswrapper work, it would be nice to see the hardware vendor stop making crappy excuses (fcc regulations other stupid ones) about releasing a linux driver.

Re:if only....

[Mordac the Preventer]

broadcom would follow intel's lead and release a linux driver.

I thought the Intel and Broadcom a/b/g WLAN stuff used the same chipset?

Re:if only....

[r_cerq]

They don't. There are 3 common WLAN chips nowadays: Centrino (Intel), BCM43xx (Broadcom) and ACX100 (TI). Some might argue a fourth chip into the list: Atheros, but there aren't many OEMs using it, at least where I buy my stuff.

this driver wasn't released by Intel

[gst]

Yes, it's an open source centrino driver - but i wasn't released by intel. RTFWebsite before you post.

http://ipw2100.sourceforge.net/#about
---snip-- -
This project was created to enable support for the Intel PRO/Wireless 2100 (IPW2100) mini PCI adapter. This project is intended to be a community effort as much as is possible given some working constraints (mainly, no HW documentation is available)
---snip---

Re:this driver wasn't released by Intel

[michich]

That's interesting because the original announcement was sent to LKML by James Ketrenos from the address jketreno at linux.co.intel.com.

I don't get it

[edbarrett]

The contact email address is ipw2100adminlinuxintelco m, the readme says it's copyright intel, but the home page says

This project is intended to be a community effort as much as is possible given some working constraints (mainly, no HW documentation is available)

So intel is not releasing the necessary documentation for the hardware, but has set up a SF project for "The Open Source Community" to figure it out?

Re:I don't get it

[Halthar]

Maybe they are truly in touch with open source projects everywhere, and when it comes to documentation simply said "screw it, someone else will write it!"

Re:I don't get it

[Biotech9]

So intel is not releasing the necessary documentation for the hardware, but has set up a SF project for "The Open Source Community" to figure it out?

Perhaps this is intels retaliatory snub to MS. It has seemed to me that there have been a few cracks appearing in the wintel alliance, not least the adoption of the G5 succesor for the Xbox2.
perhaps intel will start helping out the open source community a bit in order to piss of Gates and co.?

Re:I don't get it

[MWelchUK]

They probably can't release the documentation for some reason, however as long as there are a number of intel people on the project _with_ access to the documentation this isn't as huge a problem as it would otherwise be.

This allows the community to help stear the portions of the code that don't require the documentation and to help them properly tie the driver into Linux.

As long as the code isn't a complete mess it will also be possible to get some understanding of the workings of the chip from the code.

I agree that it is not ideal, however it's better than a binary-only driver.

Re:I don't get it

[toolz]

It's a "clean room" effort, dude!

The guy(s) doing this are working without documentation, just capabilities, and are producing a driver that works. Reverse engineering, to protect Intel's IP.

Nothing new about that, except maybe that they are doing it within the same company.

Hooray!

[mrseigen]

Maybe now I'll reconsider buying that Thinkpad over a Powerbook for a split second.

Re:Hooray!

[Unregistered]

(This isn't offtopic, read the parent)
btw, does linux support Airport Extreme yet?

Don't bother yet, its not finished

[Anonymous Coward]

TODO

- long/short preamble support
- enhance wireless extension support
- adhoc
- encryption (WEP)
- continue to add support for addtional SW RF kill switch implementations
- "shared" authentication
- transmit power control
- power states support (ACPI)

Yes you read that right. So is there anything this driver does do?

After promising and promising to support Linux we get this. A crappy not finished driver. I suppose I'm supposed to be happy that Intel finally started to work on this after like what, a year after we should have had support? Sorry Intel but screw off. I already bought a PCMCIA Wireless NIC. And I'm sure as heck not going to replace it with you crappy nic and unfinished drivers. Thanks for nothing. Next notebook I buy is going to be AMD powered.

Re:Don't bother yet, its not finished

[Neophytus]

and that's why it hasn't been announced apart to a list mainly inhabited by developers

Re:Don't bother yet, its not finished

[rjkm]

Correct, they are one year too late.

I bought a centrino notebook last year only because Intel promised there would be support "soon". One year later, there still is nothing working available. Does writing a driver take that long for them or were they simply lying back then?

I also bought a 54bit PCMCIA card in the meantime. In at most another year this notebook will be obsolete anyway and guess what I will NOT buy next ...

Re:Don't bother yet, its not finished

[jmorris42]

Looks like you didn't do your pre-sales research. I did, so I am running a Thinkpad X31 with a Cisco 350 miniPCI wireless card. EVERYTHING on this laptop is supported except hot dock/undock. There is a partially closed driver installed for the slmodem, but since I haven't actually used the modem outside of a quick test it isn't a critical issue. I also have to disable AGP video access when on battery power to avoid a problem with suspend, but it works fine when I'm docked.

And yes I made damned sure the salesman knew that I did NOT want Centrino technology and I made sure they knew why. In the end that is the only thing Intel will understand.

Re:Don't bother yet, its not finished

[Etyenne]

Yes you read that right. So is there anything this driver does do?

Can it send packet ?

Re:Big Deal

[Anonymous Coward]

Comments from pro-Microsoftites like you really hurt as I reflect on my 6 figure paycheck, my $350K house, and Audi RS6 all provided because of my Linux background. You just think about that as you're eating your Ramen noodles at lunch Sir Button Clicker.

Intel releases?

[TheRaven64]

From the article:

This project is intended to be a community effort as much as is possible given some working constraints (mainly, no HW documentation is available)

What am I missing? This doesn't look like an Intel-sponsored effort to me...

Woo hoo

[skiflyer]

Great... this makes me much more pleased about my IBM t41 which is in the mail.

Now, any geeks around Chicago wanna help me get setup? Everytime I install linux on a laptop I only get it 90% correct, and manage to completely bork it based on the other 10% about 6 months down the road.

Re:Woo hoo

[tedric]

You shouldn't have any trouble with the T41. At least my model works great. IBM (Germany) had a special offer including SuSE Pro 9 (the standard box). Additionally to that I got a special T40/T41 CD that repartitioned the harddrive (15GB Win XP, 45GB Linux ;)) and installed SuSE with all necessary modules. It went really great, no trouble at all.

Also check out www.linux-on-laptops.com. Especially for IBM laptops there are lots of pages out there describing linux installations for various distributions in-depth.

Btw: I ordered my T40p with the optional 802.11a/b/g card (standard is a/b) and installed FC1 - not because SuSE is bad, just because I'm used to RH. The card is manufactured by Philips and works just fine with the modules from madwifi (visit SourceForge). Well, with kernel 2.4.*, I still have some trouble with kernel 2.6.*.

Re:Woo hoo

[doorbot.com]

I ordered my T40p with the optional 802.11a/b/g card (standard is a/b) and installed FC1

The DAG Apt Repository for RedHat 9 has a MadWifi driver module for 2.4.20; just install it through Synaptic. It works well on my ThinkPad T40.

Re:Woo hoo

[Anonymous Coward]

I just installed FC1 on a T41. No problems. Of course, I didn't attempt wireless support, but everything else is flawless.

Damn, this notebook is fine. You're one lucky dude.

Re:OT: The Borg Icon

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

Why don't you try the candyman approach? Or doesn't MS count as a bogeyman?

Uh, this is people getting fed up

[lavalyn]

And building their own driver.

Like the eepro100 driver from before? Or those Texas Instruments wireless chipsets in the DLink 650+? And a whole mess of other drivers for other devices from hardware companies that won't release technical specifications. Heck, are Broadcom 11g drivers out yet?

Re:Uh, this is people getting fed up

[Anonymous Coward]

James is an intel person. They really could do with noting this because at the moment people are screaming bad things when it is an official-ish development.

Re:Uh, this is people getting fed up

[David M. Andersen]

Well Broadcom actually "released" a fully-functional driver for the MIPS architecture. It can be found in Linksys access point firmware images as "Broadcom BCM43XX 802.11 Wireless Controller".

I guess you could reverse-engineer it.

• Original Module
• "Decompiled" Output (run through REC)

The source code to "wl.o" is NOT part of the GPLed code at Linksys's GPL page.

If anyone actually got it to work, rest assured someone would feel threatened and DMCA it off the face of the Internet.

However, there are FAR worse ways to disrupt communications than by tweaking a few lines of code in a driver.

Stealing Windows Driver

[darkmeridian]

I use ndiswrapper with my Truemobile 1400 card with gentoo. (Sorry. Had to say it. :P)

ndiswrapper 0.5 is absolutely great. It automagically installs using the windriver.inf file and autoloads. Downloads at >500 kb/s sustained. Does not crash.

I wonder if there can be more projects like this one that essentially steal windows drivers and puts them onto linux. There should be more unified driver APIs like ndis out there, right? I wonder if we can get rid of winmodems using wrappers.

On a sidenote, the Cisco VPN client 4.0 hangs on 2.6.3. It works if you switch to a new console. No one knows how to fix it yet. I was using the anomalistic patch, but nothing yet. I guess I have to backpatch the kernel. Yuck.

Re:Stealing Windows Driver

[Gerald]

Have you tried capturing raw 802.11 frames with NdisWrapper? (Hint: Most Windows drivers don't support this, since NDIS doesn't provide a standard interface for it. Most Linux and FreeBSD drivers do.)

Re:Stealing Windows Driver

[John Hurliman]

What version of the VPN Client are you using? I'm running kernel 2.6.3 and Cisco VPN Client 4.0.3 (B) here, and don't have any problems. If you're a Cisco VPN user, check out our university LUG's project to create a graphical frontend for the commandline client.

http://lug.wsu.edu/wsulug/vpngui/

Re:Stealing Windows Driver

[Anonymous Coward]

Way to get a Score: 3, Troll.

Re:Slow news day..

[Chuck Bucket]

nicely done, I am in your debt.

cBv

Bzzt. Wrong. Look who's doing this.

[petard]

Read the copyright on the source code, and look at the contact info posted on the sf site. It's intel. (Hint: "Copyright 2003 - 2004 Intel Corporation" and the contact is jketreno AT linux.intel.com)

Just because they aren't loudly tooting their own horn by splashing "intel" all over the sf.net website doesn't mean they're not helping/having their people do the work. What you saw simply means they haven't been able to work out how to get the HW docs out the door to the community, and are being candid about this in the first sentence of their page.

And shame on you for making bad assumptions about helpful people, and unfairly criticizing an accurate news article.

I suppose I may have been trolled here, and I hate to bite, but this needs to be corrected :-)

Re:Bzzt. Wrong. Look who's doing this.

[damieng]

Okay, I'll retract the statement "Sounds like Intel haven't helped at all" although I did mention at the end of my statement it could be that the SF site wasn't crediting intel with any assistance.

Frankly I think the rest of my posting stands. While it's obvious some people have put hard work into this I don't think Intel have met the promises covered in the previous stories.

RTFSource before you post

[petard]

Copyright(c) 2003 - 2004 Intel Corporation. All rights reserved.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free
Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option)
any later version.


Just because they've not put their name all over the site in no way makes this "not released by intel".

What about Broadcom?

[j0hndoe]

I've been thinking about buying a new Dell laptop. Most of them come with a choice of Intel or Broadcom wireless adapters. Now, the availability of an Intel open source driver is good news, however, the Broadcom adapters offer better performance (802.11g vs 802.11b) and lower power usage for the same price.

I'll probably be modded to hell for saying this, but I think I would still buy the Broadcom, since it can also be made to work using the various NDIS wrapper projects.

Re:What about Broadcom?

[DFJA]

Can anyone confirm definitively that Broadcom-based devices work with NDISWRAPPER? Last time I tried my Belkin 54g PCMCIA card I didn't succeed, but it may be time to try again, it was a while ago.

But yes, we need native drivers, not some workaround that ultimately panders to the closed mentality of certain hardware suppliers. A closed source native Linux driver would be much better than no driver at all, a stepping stone on the road to the ultimate goal of open source drivers for all hardware.

Re:What about Broadcom?

[j0hndoe]

Here's a source:

In general the following chipsets are supported:

* Broadcom
* Intel PRO/Wireless Lan (Centrino)
* Atheros
* Admtek 8211

Re:What about Broadcom?

[j0hndoe]

Er, its also mentioned on the project homepage:

http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/

Re:What about Broadcom?

[barawn]

The Dell 802.11b/g miniPCI cards (which use broadcom chipsets) work beautifully with ndiswrapper. Even stuff like iwspy works fine, so you can use ifplugd/waproamd to handle connecting to different networks and autodetecting dropped re-established connections and firing off the DHCP request again. Gotta love it. It works much better than in Windows!

You're missing reading comprhension skills

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the source:


Copyright(c) 2003 - 2004 Intel Corporation. All rights reserved.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free
Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option)
any later version.


Look at the maintainer's email address. Now consider what you're missing.

Re:You're missing reading comprhension skills

[TheRaven64]

Yes, you're quite right. It would be nice if there was something on the sourceforge page (i.e. outside the sourcecode) explaining this though. It does seem a little strange that it would be an Intel project and not have access to Intel documentation though...

Good news, but...

[biendamon]

...I'm curious why it took so long for this to finally happen. Intel knew, for a long time, that there was extensive interest.

The Centrino is a good chipset, and Centrino-based laptops are fairly popular. Even without the wireless support, I've been happy using a Linux-based Centrino laptop for the last six months. The lack of wireless access was the one thing that had been sticking in my craw.

Now, I'll be able to unequivocally recommend these laptops to friends who use Linux. This will mean more sales for Intel. This, I would think, would be considered a Good Thing (tm). So why the wait?

Wireless extensions

[fdawg]

Anyone know if this implementation uses wireless extensions? Will these drivers use iwconfig and the rest of wireless tool or will you have to use some proprietary intel (probably binary only) tools? If it doesnt use wireless extensions, all of the neat scripts that come with stock distributions (debian, redhat, etc) wont work without some modification.

Re:Wireless extensions

[michich]

Yes, it uses the wireless extensions.

Re:NDISWRAPPER (small warning)

[Anonymous Coward]

Ndiswrapper works great for some, but I tried for 2 whole days to get my 802.11g wireless card to work without Oopsing, and failed, despite it having a supported chipset.

I now have a prism chipset, but that driver also has problems - no signal is registered after a day or so of being connected. Reloading the driver brings the connection back, so its probably a software problem.

Open Source??

[Stiletto]

If it's like many "open source with firmware" drivers, it's probably a lot like this:


unsigned char firmware[] = { 0x22, 0x45, ...[many thousands of bytes].... };

void driver(void)
{
run_firmware(firmware);
}


Uh, yea, I'd consider that open source all right...

Re:Open Source??

[michich]

In a post to LKML James Ketrenos said this:

Yes, it is really firmware. It is loaded from disk as a block of data and passed to the card. The system CPU doesn't execute anything out of the firmware, nor does the firmware know anything about the kernel.

Re:Open Source??

[T5]

Keyspan USB to serial converters are like this as well. This sparked a lot of debate on lkml on whether the firmware, clearly not open source, could be included in the kernel driver code. The upshot of that lengthy discussion was that yes, firmware can be bundled in the kernel code since it's not actually run by the host processor that's running the kernel.

*BSD Driver?

[nurb432]

Thats really nice the released for linux, but how about us FBSD folks.. or are we out of luck on this one...

Re:*BSD Driver?

[at2000]

Doesn't FreeBSD have Linux emulation? We emulated before now we see the fruits. Can you?

Re:*BSD Driver?

[Imperator]

Well since they're giving you a closed firmware with an open interface, presumably you can code a driver to it. Or you can just port the Linux driver.

Re:*BSD Driver?

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Just use Bill Paul's NDISulator (available in reasonably recent -CURRENT or 5.3 - you're running 5.x on your laptop, aren't you?) with the Windows driver. You'll never notice a difference.

not excited

[asv108]

Only a year after there was an official announcement for linux drivers, which was later recanted, intel releases incomplete drivers. I'm sorry but Intel could of handled this situation a LOT better. I feel really sorry for the people who have had a "centrino" laptop for the past year and a useless wifi card.

When I purchased my X31 from IBM a year ago, instead of going for a wireless option, I bought the machine "wireless rdy" and put in my own linux compatible prism2 minipci card, purchased off ebay. Because of this incident, I will certainly stay away from purchasing any item from intel where linux support is promised in the near future.

Hopefully companies like Intel will start to realize that Desktop Linux is here and people who are decision makers & influencer's in IT make up a significant portion of the desktop linux populous.

Re:not excited

[ttrafford]

Only a year after there was an official announcement for linux drivers, which was later recanted, intel releases incomplete drivers.

This is not a release, this is basically an alpha for people to help with testing and debugging. It says right on the site that most of the work on it will be in the coming weeks.

Re:not excited

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Only a year after there was an official announcement for linux drivers, which was later recanted, intel releases incomplete drivers.

Assuming it's the stock firmware and there isn't any undisclosed magic: Even if Intel completely bailed at this point the open-source community would be able to finish the job. Should be all spiffy "real soon now".

I'm sorry but Intel could of handled this situation a LOT better. I feel really sorry for the people who have had a "centrino" laptop for the past year and a useless wifi card.

I'm with you on that.

Re:not excited

[huge]

[ Here goes my karma ]

Hopefully companies like Intel will start to realize that Desktop Linux is here[...]

Where are you exactly?

[...]decision makers & influencer's in IT make up a significant portion of the desktop linux populous.

Stop ranting and do something about it - use your power as a decision maker and choose products from some other company. If there are so many of us, we'll see Intel's crashing and burining before end of this year - after that they'll probably only write drivers for linux, ignoring all other platforms, because that's the only way to keep decision makers happy.

Or could it be so that in reality Linux on desktop is still more curiosity than anything else?

Re:not excited

[Spoing]

1. Because of this incident, I will certainly stay away from purchasing any item from intel where linux support is promised in the near future.

Rebates. Software leasing. Firmware upgrades for MP3 players. Lotery tickets. Promises for anything that isn't *right here now*.

All of these are a bet, and the odds are not in our favor. Linux has little to do with it.

Open source?

[Anonymous Coward]

More like an open-source interface to a closed-source firmware.
You still have to go here, agree to a EULA and download a binary image to be able to use this module (I found it humorous that Intel's download site admonished me for using Firefox on linux, and suggested I upgrade to IE6 or NS6).
You use the driver by doing:
modprobe ipw2100 firmware=/usr/share/firmware/ipw2100-1.0.fw
where ipw2100-1.0.fw is the current binary firmware image.

Re:Open source?

[kju]

This is utter nonsense. Prism54 is utilizing firmware as well, as do a bunch of other linux drivers. Every fricking wlan card out there has a firmware, it happens only that in the past most had the firmware flashed on the card / into the hardware, while nowadays the firmware is loaded by the driver into the card at runtime. Which is better, as upgrading the driver can (and will often) update the firmware too, without having to reflash first.

Somewhere you need to draw a line, and having firmware is nothing wrong but in fact often just necessary.

Re:Open source?

[dmaxwell]

At least the firmware approach means that the drivers will work on non-x86 arches as well. I realize that video cards are whole nother kettle of fish but it would be nice if video cards just exposed a 3D api and all the interesting stuff happened on the card itself. It would be more optimal that what nvidia does now. Yeah it would be nice if the entire piece of hardware was open but least this approach lets us treat the hardware as a periphreal and not a black box that gets chucked into the kernel.

Re:Open source?

[cocotoni]

Pray tell, on which non-x86 arch are you going to use Intel Centrino drivers for the INTEL Centrino processor on the INTEL board?

Re:Open source?

[Anonymous Coward]

the wireless chip is on a separate board (miniPCI), you could use it in a Mac Powerbook if you liked.

It's not part of the CPU.

Re:Open source?

[transops.net]

If anyone has mod points burning a hole in their pocket, please consider modding the parent post down.

"Centrino" is not the processor. It's Intel's project designation for their current wireless integration tech. The processor would be something along the lines of "Pentium."

Sig: Seeking partnerships with web design firms.

Re:NDISWRAPPER (small warning)

[0biJon]

If you have the Prism Chipset you should head to http://prism54.org
There's a working linux driver and lots of support. However, it's still VERY experimental and can be tough to get working... but it does work.

Re:OT: The Borg Icon

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently they removed the original message but left your reply. I'd like to see evidence that OSDN isn't under some sort of injunction or legal obligation to censor content unfavorable to Microsoft. I haven't seen a story posted on Slashdot with Bill and the Borg icon in awhile, yet there are great stories out there that historically have been of rave interested to Slashdot readers.

E.g., Microsoft's Windows Media 9 may become mandatory for HD DVD

Emulation

[nurb432]

I belive that is only to run linux-elf binaries, not for low-level things such as device drivers..

I could be wrong of course, but that was my understanding.

Re:Emulation

[at2000]

What a pity then. But can something open source be very difficult to port, given that they don't intend to do so?

The problem I have with Centrinos WLAN...

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem I have with Centrinos WLAN is the fact that due to its embedded nature, I've yet to see any with antennas. I'd like to put a gain on my WiFi laptop around campus as the AP are far and wide. Why don't they make a standard jack for an antenna or something? It'd be quite useful other than being limited to "the AP inside the same room" sort of thing.

Thanks for the info /nt

[alex_tibbles]

no text

MOD PARENT UP!

[alex_tibbles]

This explains how the GPL kernel can include non-free binaries which operate with free drivers.

One word.

[pair-a-noyd]

Progress.

No specs?

[tmasssey]

From what I can tell, Intel is *not* releasing the specs.

Quote from the first page at http://ipw2100.sourceforge.net/:

This project was created by Intel to enable support for the Intel PRO/Wireless 2100 (IPW2100) mini PCI adapter. This project is intended to be a community effort as much as is possible given some working constraints (mainly, no HW documentation is available) (Emphasis mine)

So in Intel's own words, they did not release the specs, and I can't find anything on the site that says different...

Re: Modidiots

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, ModIdiots!

The 600M _IS_ A Centrino. Centrino platform has that Intel Pro/2100 wireless mini-PCI card which makes his post at least somewhat relevant.

Inspiring

[TwistedSpring]

Wow now this is interesting. Intel have decided that they're going to call on the massive contingent of Open Source developers for their Linux driver. This benefits them because they don't have to hire programmers or support the drivers and can outsource it to the community at large who will maintain it. Under license, they still own the drivers, but the public who want the drivers are developing them effectively for Intel.

Has there been an instance of this before? OEMs don't usually endorse open source dev projects for their hardware, but if more OEMs did do this then we'd see a huge amount of support for devices that are currently not compatible with various operating systems, and an extended development life for drivers for aging hardware. Obviously this method applies to not only "classic" open source OS's such as Linux, but Windows as well. After all, the OEM isn't selling the drivers, it's selling the hardware and firmware.

I'd love to see more manufacturers posting the source to their drivers and the developer documentation to allow their drivers to be improved and worked on by the willing open source community at large, while the OEM maintains endorsement and ownership of the developed software. It seems to me this method harms nobody and benefits all.

Re:Inspiring

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Wow now this is interesting. Intel have decided that they're going to call on the massive contingent of Open Source developers for their Linux driver. This benefits them because they don't have to hire programmers or support the drivers and can outsource it to the community at large who will maintain it.

Better:

They open-sourced the driver proper, only keeping the firmware closed.

They're providing starter code and a contact guy who can look provide enough help with the proprietary stuff that the community doesn't need to worry about getting hung due to inaccessable info.

Short of opening the firmware this like the best support model yet.

Re:Inspiring

[Wesley Felter]

Are you new here? This is how many open source drivers have been done for years.

Re:Inspiring

[TwistedSpring]

No I'm not new here. Open Source drivers are often hacked together by programmers doing reverse engineering and consulting various RFCs and documentations. They are rarely endorsed by the company that manufactures the hardware, and projects like this do not get terribly much support from the hardware manufacturers (like, no links to the open source driver from their website, no hosting of it, no mention of it). Normally if a driver is needed for something it has to be figured out by some poor sod or is made by an employee of the company that manufactured the hardware in their spare time.

standards?

[Shwag]

/etc/firmware/ipw2100-1.0.fw

wow, so now firmware is considered a config file that belongs in /etc. Im glad to see people are following the LSB.

Re:standards?

[TeddyR]

instead of mouthing off, maybe linking to the LSB standards page that contains the specifications. Thing is, you probably mean theFilesystem Hierarchy Standard /etc/firmware may not be in either documents, but since it is used by MANY rpms, including the kernel-util rpms for microcode data it is the de-facto standard for binary firmware images that need to be accessed by device drivers at boot time....

Unfortunately another step is missing

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel still hasnt given the XFree developers the specs for switching the 855 graphics chip to non standard resolutions, therefore XFree still is borked on many Centrino machines running 1400x1050!

Opensource Firmware

[Starji]

From what I'm reading on other posts it seems like the open source part is just the interface to the firmware. Is it possible to write a totally new open source firmware that would work with this driver? Or rather will it be easier now that we have a closed source one?

How about a universal wraper?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't it be nice to have a universal API to describe hardware funcionality operating system independant? This way, the driver could easily be compiled onto different platforms. Also, the driver writer wouldn't have to worry about writing for the linux wlan architecture - instead programming for an API which would include wrappers for Linux, Windows, and whateverelse might come in the future. The entire linux and/or windows driver API may become extinct, thus requiring new drivers for old hardware. If the driver was written in a universal way, simply porting the API over would be enough to cause all the drivers to work unmodified. Why should a hardware maker have to understand the Linux kernel simply to describe hardware funcionality?

No Tresspassing!

[BLKMGK]

WEP on an AP also makes it crystal clear that you're not expecting "visitors" so any legal proceedings later on are much more likely to bear fruit. Kind of hard for someone to say they just "stumbled" upon your network when the network is encrypted by default and requires effort to access...

Too little, too late -- My new iBook just rocks

[Nice2Cats]

This is too little, too late from Intel: I have already bought an iBook instead of the IBM ThinkPad I had been considering -- and yes, the Centrino driver problem was high on my list of reasons to switch to an Apple platform. So far (two weeks), no problems, very happy, love my little white box. Can't wait for the next version of Yellow Dog Linux to come out.

Stupid of Intel to wait so long, stupid of companies like IBM to let them drag their feet: Other vendors have pretty portables, too. If things stay as cool as they are, I'll be sticking with Apple as a hardware base for Linux.

Re:Too little, too late -- My new iBook just rocks

[op00to]

What a waste. The Ibook is huge, and makes you look like a total poofter. Why don't you carry around a purse, too? My thinkpad gets me LAID!

Re:Too little, too late -- My new iBook just rocks

[Wesley Felter]

The IBM a/b/g wireless card has been supported by the madwifi driver for a while. It's not open source, but it works.

Re:Too little, too late -- My new iBook just rocks

[Anonymous Coward]

for you Americans: poofter = faggot

Permission systems are also expressions of intent.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

WEP on an AP also makes it crystal clear that you're not expecting "visitors" so any legal proceedings later on are much more likely to bear fruit. Kind of hard for someone to say they just "stumbled" upon your network when the network is encrypted by default and requires effort to access.

Exactly.

Just as with file permission systems, WEP encryption performs two jobs:
- It makes it (slightly) harder to have the forbidden access.
- It informs the user that the system operator didn't INTEND him to have free access.

Interpreting permission settings as an expression of intent (and not, for instance, browsing other people's read-protected files without asking first or having a darned good reason - like policy enforcement or criminal investigation) is a long tradition in computer culture.

And (as you and others have already pointed out) it is the exact analogy of a "no tresspassing" sign or a latch on a flimsy screen door or window. This will likely give it a well-understood place in law, once precedents are established to make the correspondence explicit.

Might be more regulation, cost, or repair trouble.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Why don't they make a standard jack for an antenna or something? It'd be quite useful other than being limited to "the AP inside the same room" sort of thing.

I understand that some countries' FCC analogs mandate that WLAN not be connected to external antennas, or mandate special connectors to make this difficult. (Even in the US you're supposed to drop the signal strength a bit when you use a directional antenna - though not anywhere near the gain of the antenna and the FCC encourages the use of directionals.)

Second: A microwave RF jack is fragile and not cheap. PC board hacking for microwaves is difficult. Could be they're trying to save design, parts, and repair cost by eliminating a little-used feature.

If you want to connect an external antenna, use a cheap WIFI card with a connector. (Then when the connector breaks from plugging it in every time you come home with the laptop, replace the card. Or leave the card at home and plug THAT in, using the onboard, internal-antenna, WIFI when on the go.)

Firmware License - Removal of rights

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really. Most hardware nowadays contains firmware (modern wireless cards are often just ARM cores attached to a radio transmitter), but in many cases it's in ROM or flash and you've never noticed.

That's true, but when the firmware is built-in you don't need to agree to any licensing terms. You implicitly have the right to reverse-engineer the firmware, since it was part of the hardware.

To download or use the firmware for this Intel driver, you have to give up right to disassemble the software, as well as some other rights.

There's also a more practical problem - many Linux (and BSD) distributions refuse to ship closed-source software, so they can't include this firmware. This would make installing an operating system more difficult.

thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

About time. Really about time. Thanks intel.

Does it work?

[peksik]

Has anyone actually tried the driver out yet? I'm interested in hearing actual results that can be achieved with the current version.

Re:Does it work?

[gyrojoe]

Despite the comments from many posters that it is "incomplete" it does indeed work. It seems like they are making the driver a priority too. I emailed James Ketrenos (the Intel developer listed on the page) about a segfault I got in the wireless tools (my fault mostly). His response was quite fast and very promising: "[the fix] may not make it into 0.30 today, but a fix should be in 0.31 tomorrow. Seems to me like the driver is progressing quickly and is somewhat of a priority for Intel.
Even if it uses binary firmware, this is still better than using ndiswrapper/DriverLoader to emulate the Windows driver.

Closed source firmware - so what?

[peksik]

I'm not a device driver expert, so correct me if I'm wrong. People seem to bitch about the drivers because the device firmware isn't open source. I can't understand why that's such a bad thing. First of all, the most significant advantage of having open source drivers is - unless you're RMS - that you don't have to rely on the manufacturer to write new drivers for more recent kernels and such. We have that advantage with these drivers. The firmware is what the actual device is fed, and it's not like anyone's going to upgrade your NIC's kernel or anything. ;-)
If I'm not totally out on the blue I believe these drivers should be possible to port to *BSD if wanted, since the only code that is closed here is what the device uses, and not what the kernel uses.

Re:Closed source firmware - so what?

[Anonymous Coward]

- unless you're RMS -

ok, i may agree with the usage of binary firmwares... but holy shit, please release the binary with a license that permit its redistribution, i want to see it included directly in mandrake, fedora, debian-non-free, etc... otherwise the configuration for a newbye will be a pain in the ass.

But

[Anonymous Coward]

it'd be nice it they could do the same for their winmodems.

5.x on a laptop?

[nurb432]

Cant get 5.2 to reconize my pcmcia driver.. :(

Re:Big Deal

[alfarom101]

Do you have a job for me :-), I'm not fussy, I do both command prompt and button clicking. And I would settle for an RS4.

Bought X31, shoulda gotta PowerBook...

[Trull]

I bought a (relatively) nice X31 Thinkpad, installed Fedora, and it pretty much works. Of course the WiFi manager has never flickered into life as a) The Intel driver for 802.1b doesnt work and b) The LinuxAnt driver setup doesnt either.

If I'd been more thoughtful I would have bought a ultranice Apple PowerBook, had WiFi compatibility out of the box, a faster processor, nicer looking beast and can update the OS with much less clicks...And the terminal side would have allowed me to work just as effectively.

Humph.

Torc