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The Problem With Driver-Loaded Firmware
Kadin2048 writes "If you've gone to a big-box store and purchased a wireless card recently, you might have had some trouble getting it to work under Linux, or any non-Windows OS for that matter. One reason for this is that more and more manufacturers are producing hardware that are useless without proprietary firmware. While these new designs allow for lower parts counts and thus lower cost, it presents a serious problem for F/OSS software because it can sometimes guarantee no out-of-the-box compatibility. Jem Matzan has produced a detailed article, "The battle for wireless network drivers," on the subject, including interviews with manufacturers' representatives and OS developers, including Theo de Raadt. The bottom line? In general, Asian hardware manufacturers were far more responsive and liberal about firmware than U.S. manufacturers (Intel included). Look for more firmware issues in the future, as not only wireless hardware, but regular wired Ethernet cards, take the driver-loaded firmware approach."
I have always wondered if part of the reason this sort of thing is so popular might be because it curries favor with MS. I'm certain MS is NOT displeased with this sort of thing. Can we say "winmodem"?
I recently purchased a Dynex DX-WGDTC PCI card from Best Buy for 35 bucks, the chipset had some sort of aluminum heat sink over it. I took a gamble and bought it anyway with a feeling that it was manufactured by D-Link. Turns out I was right, it has an Atheros 5212 chipset and I was ecstatic. The madwifi drivers work spectacular with this card. A patched madwifi-ng driver will allow you to crack WEP using ARP injection *wink* I recommend you go out and buy one immediately.
I've asked a thousand times and never had answered very well:
List wireless cards, vendors, and prices that I can obtain today, which do work with Linux.
The compatability lists on the linux wireless sites are useless -- sure there are lots of cards that work, but many of them
have been discontinued for years, some were only available in certain locales, and some, if you found the model, have had their
chipsets changes.
I know of no resource that would allow me to successfully pursue wither of the following use cases:
1. I want to purchase an 802.11g device guaranteed by the vendor to work with some version of Linux.
2. I want to make a purchase order for a wireless device by vendor and part number, for a corpoarte deployment.
I consider my wireless cards to be rare and treasured artifacts. I didn't upgrade my notebook because I knew I was extremely
lucky to get a laptop with a built-in Prysm2. The situation *sucks* far worse than the winmodem situation ever did.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
In general, Asian hardware manufacturers were far more responsive and liberal about firmware than U.S. manufacturers (Intel included). Look for more firmware issues in the future, as not only wireless hardware, but regular wired Ethernet cards, take the driver-loaded firmware approach.
Let's take this from a slightly different perspective:
In general American hardware manufacturers were far more pigheaded and close-mouthed about firmware than Asian manufacturers (Intel especially.) Look for more firmware issues in the future, as Asian corporations continue to take over the remnants of the U.S. manufacturing sector, with U.S. companies stubbornly trying to hang on to their "intellectual property".
Maybe if these idiots stopped listening their legal teams (and Microsoft!) so much, started worrying less about developers using their oh-so-precious "intellectual property" to make their own products useful to even more customers we wouldn't be in this fix. American tech companies are shooting themselves in the foot, having forgotten that continuous innovation and fresh ideas, not hordes of attorneys, are what drive a tech sector to competitiveness. Meanwhile, China is walking off with the the entire candy store.
There are only two ways to beat your competition in the modern world: out-lawyer them or out-think them. We used to be in the latter camp (Yankee ingenuity, and all that) but not any more.
Rather depressing, really.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
According to the article, there are three companies that have actually worked with the free software community on drivers. Here is the list:
Ralink Technology
Atmel Corporation
Realtek Linux drivers here
Vote with your money, folks. If you would like to see companies cooperate with the free software community, reward the companies that do so by buying their products.
If you know of a particular piece of WiFi hardware that works particularly well in Linux or BSD, please follow up here so we all know what to buy. (See also this list.)
Basically everything powered by ZyDas and RaLink-Chipsets works flawlessly with GNU/Linux and the Free/OpenBSD. You can grab those off of EBay dirt cheap in large quantities, mostly from Power Sellers/commercial shops. Big-brand vendors with "the good stuff" on their boards I've personally seen yet were GigaByte (for MiniPCI), ASUS (PCI), and a crapload of others with ZyDas and Prism (for USB - including, for instance, NetGear).
There's also an emerging (well, maybe they exist for ages, but I've not known the company up until recently) manufacturer for networking gear called "TP-LINK" which sells virtually everything from RaLink. I happen to have a "TP-LINK TL-WN321G" (usb2 full speed) adapter which features a RaLink chip supported by the rt73-usb driver just perfectly. Cost me 9 Euro in germany.
Hth.
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
YTARY!
These articles are always frustrating to me, because I can read about chipsets that work, but not about which cards support them. It's hard to go to newegg and buy a card, because many of the cards that have the good chipsets come in different versions with bad chipsets.
My ancient orinoco silver pcmcia card stopped working with ubuntu as of edgy. I don't know why. It works with other distros. But it's not 802.11g, and it doesn't do WPA, and although it's not important to me, it's not great for scanning.
So I want to buy a card. I'd order one today, but I don't know what to get.
I know our buying power as a community is small, but I'd think that some no-name card manufacturer would find it worthwhile to make a card that has a picture of a penguin on it, and that is fully supported by free software. I'd pay a little more for a card that I know will just work, and that will continue to work.
Well, it's certainly a nice idea, and in an ideal world, it would be a good plan. Unfortunately, Linus couldn't have written Linux in a vacuum. He had access to an architecture reference manual or similar information about PC's and IA32. He had access to a compiler which would allow him to program in a standard language, which would automatically generate the machine code for IA32. He had access to book on how to write operating systems, and he had access to Minix to get some ideas of how it could be done.
And it still took a few years before it was really a decent operating system.
Now, imagine if he had access to only DOS. He didn't have any documentation about the hardware, he didn't have a compiler for it. He just had a copy of DOS. It was all he knew about PC's. It was his only example of how to do an OS. It probably would have taken more than just a few years to turn Linux into a decent OS.
That's basically all you have when you want to write a firmware. No functional specs. No hardware documentation. Is it possible to make a working irmware for a wireless card? Sure, I don't see why it wouldn't be possible. But, when you have a variety of manufacturers making a variety of cards, and you want to support them all before they stop being relevant to the market, and it takes probably several years of tinkering for any given card, then "hackers GO!" isn't really a viable hardware support plan.
The US FCC seems to be in no hurry to do anything that would support community efforts to write firmware, given their apparent hostility toward HAMs, and I expect it will be a good many years before the FCC is completely realigned. It isn't really a hot button issue, so I wouldn't even expect a hardcore Democrat president to bother with it just for the sake of being different from Bush. If it won't happen in this or the next administration, then it will be a minimum of six to ten years before we can even dream about regulations causing us to just be handed hardware documentation. Consequently, folks like Theo have made firmware a personal issue. I applaud them, and really hope that he is able to make some headway with this.
Not only that, I have written OS/2 and FreeBSD drivers for it outside of work hours (but with permission).
There is ABSOLUTELY NO REASON why a FOSS driver cannot install the firmware. This is NOT the problem. There MAY be a problem with distribution rights, or with documenting how to load the firmware, but these are NOT what TFA described.
While one might like to have the spec for writing one's own GPL firmware, and I dont see prob;lems with that, I do see a problem with expecting $100,000 worth of firmware development for free, when the hardware can be replicat4ed for a $10, and the combination normally sells for $100. Ie there are products on the market where the majority of the value is in the firmware. and Yes, it does sometimes take more than three man-years of $100/day consultants to write firmware for a product with a predicted lifetime of 8-months. (Graphics card, anyone?)
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Yes, there are some clear winners, the forums are great, and the compatibility list is: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Wireles sCardsSupported
As far as the router, I tend to stick with anything that is supported by DD-WRT
http://www.dd-wrt.com/
The best is to find the wireless cards that work perfectly with network-manager right out of the box on the recent version(s) of Ubuntu.
Quick clarification, seeing some of the posts here about "winmodems" and junkware-infested drivers:
Drivers run on your computer and let it talk to the device.
Firmware is "software" that runs on the device - typically code for on-board microcontrollers, Field Programmamble Gate Arrays (FPGA) and other "soft hardware".
There is nothing wrong with the idea of using driver-loaded firmware - it simplifies the device (no need for on-board flash memory) and makes it easier to fix "hardware" issues with an updated driver (with less risk of "bricking" a device by muffing a firmware update). Linux can actually cope with it quite happily - A lot of digital TV cards rely on driver-loaded firmware and its all fine and dandy provided that either (a) the manufacturer offers a download of the firmware or (b) it can be extracted from the windows driver CD or (c) some evil pirate has selfishly conspired to increase the manufacturer's customer base by posting an iffy copy.
There is an interesting question as to the status of such a "firmware blob" vis. the GPL (especialy the anti-TiVOization clauses of V3). Is it part of the software (thus tainting the free-ness of any drivers that require it) or part of the hardware (FPGA "software" is more like a circuit diagram than a program - and the "source code" might be useless without proprietary software from the FPGA manufacturer - and tweaking it might void the FCC/CE certification of the device)?
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
From http://www.theory.physics.ubc.ca/transit.html:
This card [M-Audio Transit] needs to have firmware downloaded to the card on the USB bus to work. It uses a non-standard "DFU" method which seems to have some problems with Linux. It also mixes its Type I and Type III endpoints to confuse the software. I have found (with the help of and software written by Clement Ladisch and Takashi Iwai.) a way to make this card useable.The card requires firmware to be downloaded to the card first for it to work as a soundcard. While it appears on the usb bus with Vendor/ProductID of 0763/2806 this is a very primative usb device that does nothing except wait for firmware.
A firmware loader for M-Audio audio devices is available at http://usb-midi-fw.sourceforge.net/. Interestingly enough, the set-up procedure involves copying the firmware bin file from the Windows driver installation, which is subsequently used by the firmware loader.
Anyways, TFA makes some interesting points:
Unrestricted redistribution of firmware files is satisfactory for some open source operating system projects like OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and many varieties of GNU/Linux, but others like Fedora Core and Debian demand an entirely free software environment, so redistribution of the firmware without the ability to modify and distribute the source code is prohibited.The firmware, although its being loaded to the device, is still firmware. Do distributions that demand an entirely free sofware environment ship drivers for devices with proprietary firmware? Of course they do. I'm not convinced that this should be any different.
I think that Theo de Raadt, of OpenBSD, has it right:
So instead of lobbying for documentation to write open source firmware, de Raadt would prefer to simply have the right to freely distribute necessary proprietary firmware files with his operating system, along with correct firmware interface documentation so that a driver can be created, and information from the manufacturer regarding bug workarounds.-azzurro