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OpenBSD Ahead of Linux for Wi-Fi Drivers
algae writes "It looks like some kernel developers have noticed that the OpenBSD project is including reverse-engineered drivers for wireless ethernet cards while Linux is still using binary blobs. A large part of the issue is that much OpenBSD development takes place abroad, where having to do clean-room reverse-engineering isn't as important." From the article: "Christoph Hellwig took another stance, 'please don't let this reverse engineering idiocy hinder wireless driver adoption, we're already falling far behind openbsd who are very successfully reverse engineering lots of wireless chipsets.'"
I just started using FreeBSD 6.1 recently and I was surpised about the ease of setting it up. (Still not for the faint of heart, but Windows isn't either. If you want a nice custom setup that does what you want, you need a lot of time in Windows). My primary laptop is a P-III 600MHz with 512Meg RAM. An old fucker I bought for peanuts. It didn't have a network interface, so I added a Sweex wireless adapter. It shows up in both FreeBSD as Windows under RaLink 2500. (Note that Sweex is a cheapass brand, but for another product I had *excellent* support by email with them)
Linux.... Nothing... No out of the box recognition.
OpenBSD also recognised it but doesn't support WPA-PSK which I do require. FreeBSD supports WPA-PSK. I've been an OpenBSD fanboy for a long time, but I like FreeBSD equally now. Linux... well, somehow I have problems with most distributions. Either philosophical problems or technical problems :-) With *BSD, I have neither.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
can be found by reading the man pages
Openbsd is going to maintain the anti-blob. I was down a wireless security with openbsd talk in Calgary after the hackathon last week which Theo attended and you can be sure OpenBSD will maintain the anti-blob. The discussion about blobs centred around what has been said before on openbsd.org. OpenBSD is first and foremost about security in its default state. You can't include arbitrary code that you don't compile yourself in such a system, you can't verify that's it doing what it says its doing. Further more Asian developers are more then happy to hand over all the required spec documents to get wider support for their wireless chipset. American companies however are going the otherway and would rather build drivers for each system the feel is important enough to warrent them.
I'm sure they have their reasons but at the end of the day their way attempt at full circle development control will probably back fire. In an attempt to maintain a clean intellectual property enviroment where every participant is governed by NDA's and priorities are set by Mama corporate they have traded in creditabilty and grass root adoption. Whether this will ultimately cause them bottom line trama will be determined later in life. But one must only look at the economic trend in america as a whole to take a guess as to where this is going.
America is becoming a service industry economy and losing its development and manufacturing roots, those jobs are being shipped oversea to asian companies that care more about making product then protecting copy rights. The cards that history played out however means that America still has trillions in wealth and the world's economies will continue to market heavily to americans to buy their products. Until that money dries up and their attention turns elsewhere. Once that occurs you won't see Toyota putting plants in Indiana to demonstrate how many local jobs it produces. It will put them in South America where the labour is half the price.
As I see this is just another example of how American values of fairness, quality, openess and honesty have been lost in the boardroom and consequently the world is turning elsewhere.
Hillbilly1980(damnit what's my password)
The only one I'm aware of is OliveBSD.
http://g.paderni.free.fr/olivebsd/
Haven't used it myself, however.
Slackware
Please don't forget the software, as most intelligence for programmable logic is contained there. Developing a wafer for an FPGA is easy compared to writing synthesis/P&R software for it. Automatic place and route is a really hard problem.
I'd double that, and allocate most of it to synthesis/P&R software. Although such software obviously needs to be free (libre), I think you really want to pay people to write it or it'll never become useable.
Apart from the sheer amount of work, I have to admit it does sound like fun. Although I only have experience in targetting FPGA's (I've written a couple of microprocessor cores as well as some I/O devices), not developing them myself.
Error: password can't contain reverse spelling of ancient Chinese emperor
No. Finding someone "with the chops" and interest simply isn't easy. There are simply tons of projects in the open source world that would be done very quickly if someone with the skills would do it. Instead, you have to wait around for someone with skill to get that particular itch.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I believe Open BSD has a live monowall distro, and Free BSD has one here.
I'm sure there are others.
i've taken a large linux driver and gotten it running in free with no
source changes by defining the linux interfaces as macros and
inlines. i think the only thing that didn't just fall out was
the bit-sense of PAGE_MASK.
i don't see any reason why you couldn't do the same thing in the
other direction.
But FSF aren't the Linux developers. If you ask them, they will be very adamant about that.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
OpenCores isn't the only open hardware group. Check out www.opengraphics.org, particularly the OGD1 section. Real hardware engineers are making real hardware, and they're making it OPEN (and libre).
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
http://www.pcbsd.org/
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
Indeed having it GPL counts a lot.
But still, if the driver was developed under NDA and is bloated of "magic numbers" (as often in drivers under NDA, the implementation can't contain too much comment/infos), practicaly, we're near to loose one of the fundamentals rights supposedly granted by the GPL: the right to modify and re-use it. Well, you have this right, but you can hardly use it.
In practice, source code designed to hide IP secrets is in-between normal source code and binary exec. That's why, by the way, OpenBSD devs never accept and never signs NDA, as stated there http://www.openbsd.org/goals.html for instance.
I've recently been downloading a bunch of LiveCD's just so I can play around with things.
I found http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LiveCDs to be of particular usefulness when looking for various flavors of them.
You sure are. You're not allowed to remove their copyright or their list of conditions, but there's nothing in the license that says you can't add more, even ones that negate theirs.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
* Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
* Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
* Neither the name of the nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.
* And you have to give me $400,000 per copy and say "Linux rules" 100 times.
Perfectly legal.
How we know is more important than what we know.