OpenBSD Journal

The battle for wireless network drivers

Contributed by deanna on from the what to buy dept.

In this article, Jem Matzen gives an overview of the effort to free wireless chipsets, including comments from OpenBSD developers and the vendors who work with them to provide free drivers for the vendors' products.

In order to find out why network chip manufacturers are so polarized in their support of free software operating systems, I made contact with company representatives at Atheros, Intel, Marvell, Atmel, Ralink, Texas Instruments, Broadcom, and Realtek. Not surprisingly, the manufacturers who shun operating system programmers also seem to be reluctant to talk to the press.

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By Anonymous Coward (195.158.177.77) on

    I applaud everyone at OpenBSD and also its users for the continued action in this matter.

    Our company here in southern Germany sells lots of IBM gear from 1U xSeries all the way up to BladeStations and SANs. While I have not used OpenBSD's wireless functionality the same $%&! is happening with ethernet and storage chips. You can bet your behind that I will now start to bug our IBM contacts over this because IBM is moving one server model after the other from LSI over to Adaptec ServeRAID 8k (they are almost done!).

  2. By Chas (147.154.235.52) on

    I've been vaguely interested in running the Backtrack iso from remote-exploit, only to learn that Backtrack doesn't support the Ralink adapters that I buy exclusively, which seems odd.

    It's a shame that the latest effort (whax integration) still runs on a Linux kernel, as OpenBSD seems to have the very best support. I wonder what would happen to remote-exploit if they just packed all the forbidden firmware into their iso.

  3. By Daniel Hartmeier (dhartmei) daniel@benzedrine.cx on http://www.benzedrine.cx/dhartmei.html

    Testing comment from registered user. Should show login name instead of IP address.

    Comments
    1. By Martynas Venckus (martynas) martynas@altroot.org on http://www.altroot.org/

      > Testing comment from registered user. Should show login name instead of IP address.

      Nice improvement.

      Your SSL certificate is expired, though.

      Comments
      1. By Daniel Hartmeier (dhartmei) daniel@benzedrine.cx on

        > Nice improvement.
        >
        > Your SSL certificate is expired, though.

        Fixed, thanks for the notice!

        Comments
        1. By Brynet (Brynet) brynet@gmail.com on

          > > Nice improvement.
          > >
          > > Your SSL certificate is expired, though.
          >
          > Fixed, thanks for the notice!
          >

          Thank you for hiding registered users IP's.

        2. By BSDaemon (BSDaemon) on

          > > Nice improvement.
          > >
          > > Your SSL certificate is expired, though.
          >
          > Fixed, thanks for the notice!
          >

          Testing, sorry. Cool! No human entered text!

        3. By BSDaemon (BSDaemon) on

          > > Nice improvement.
          > >
          > > Your SSL certificate is expired, though.
          >
          > Fixed, thanks for the notice!
          >

          Weird, if I click the link beside my username, it finds stuff un-related to me, including a post by BSDaemon (who wasn't me).

    2. By phessler (phessler) spambox@theapt.org on http://theapt.org

      > Testing comment from registered user. Should show login name instead of IP address.

      logged in users can mod their own responses once. is that on purpose?

      Comments
      1. By Nate Montague (Nate) nate@my-balls.com on

        > > Testing comment from registered user. Should show login name instead of IP address.
        >
        > logged in users can mod their own responses once. is that on purpose?

        It sounds like a bug rather than a feature to me.

        Comments
        1. By phessler (phessler) spambox@theapt.org on http://theapt.org

          > > > Testing comment from registered user. Should show login name instead of IP address.
          > >
          > > logged in users can mod their own responses once. is that on purpose?
          >
          > It sounds like a bug rather than a feature to me.

          yupp.

          also, if I'm registered, and I login via a different ip address, I can still mod up things I previously modded up.

          Comments
          1. By Daniel Hartmeier (dhartmei) on

            > also, if I'm registered, and I login via a different ip address, I can still mod up things I previously modded up.

            Both fixed now, thanks.

    3. By Anonymous Coward (24.37.236.100) on

      > Testing comment from registered user. Should show login name instead of IP address.

      Awesome stuff! Does this mean registered users won't need to type in the human entered text?

    4. By Chris Snell (chrissnell) on http://chrissnell.com

      What, no UID display? I was hoping for a really low one. :)

      Also, how can we make the e-mail address null by default for comments?

      thanks,

      Chris

      Comments
      1. By Ray Percival (sng) on http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=search&sort=time&query=sng

        > What, no UID display? I was hoping for a really low one. :)
        >
        > Also, how can we make the e-mail address null by default for comments?
        >
        > thanks,
        >
        > Chris

        Great minds. Since it was 13 just a second ago we at least know we're sub 15. :D

        This could get silly.

    5. By Sean (sean) on

      > Testing comment from registered user. Should show login name instead of IP address.

  4. By phessler (phessler) spambox@theapt.org on http://theapt.org

    I really like how Jem asked the same questions to each of the responding companies, and how the questions were listed with the answers. When reading interviews or quotes from people, I often wonder how out-of-context the responses are.

  5. By johannes (131.130.1.135) on

    Thanks for the link to this "interview"(?).

    I am just wondering - isn't Atmel an American corporation as well? Well, admittely I liked Atmel before, but now they seem even more likeable; Mr Bisset sounds very honest, sometimes even saying something like hey I don't know! That's a refreshing answer inbetween all this PR talk.

  6. By Rich (195.137.96.220) rich@jezitski.co.uk on

    The comments regarding the difficulty of getting in touch with MadWifi accepted, I can't help thinking that these companies MUST (!) be aware of the problems and if they REALLY wanted to co-operate, they could very easily contact the projects concerned directly, whether it be OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Linux, whoever...

    Contacting your potential customers is what sales people do; the fact that they have chosen not to do so surely says much about how little they care about this issue.

    I suspect that the reason wireless (rather than wired) network devices are being particularly protected in this way is because 98% of them will be used with MS Windows, and that market is already sewn-up. There is little incentive to bother chasing the last 2%. In contrast, a device that is widely used in a server machine is (I'm guessing) more likely to be supported by the manufacturer on free OS's because there's a significantly larger market.

    Comments
    1. By Stuart Henderson (sthen) stu@spacehopper.org on

      > Contacting your potential customers is what sales people do;

      The customers of companies producing wireless chipsets are the embedded device, wireless card and computer manufacturers, buying chips in bulk.

      General computer users are the customers of the card and computer manufacturers. Those are the people we have most leverage with, and these are the people who in turn have most leverage with the chipset manufacturers. The computer manufacturers are good people to complain to. For example: if you're interested in a particular laptop but won't buy it due to the choice of wireless chipset, make sure the computer manufacturer knows that this is the reason they have lost the sale. Bonus points if you have a legitimate reason to buy tens or hundreds of a particular laptop but won't due to their choice... Tell the company you chose instead why you went to them so they can see positive results from their choice.

    2. By Josh Keister (synfin) on

      > The comments regarding the difficulty of getting in touch with MadWifi accepted

      The MadWifi developers seem to have been represented poorly in the article. One of the main developers has recently stated on the MadWifi mailing list [1] that:

      "The project is evaluating both paths; that is:

      * We support the effort of porting "OpenHAL" - which is based on the
      Atheros driver from OpenBSD - to Linux and merging it with dadwifi. The
      results are kept in the dadwifi-openhal branch for now, and will be
      merged back into the dadwifi branch later, which in return will be
      merged back to trunk at some time.

      * We will get in contact with the SFLC, asking them for help in
      evaluating the actual FCC requirements. Albeit the expected low chances
      of success and in the hope that this evaluation will strengthen our
      position, we will try to convince Atheros to make the sources for their
      HAL freely available."

      [1] http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.org.freifunk.wlannews/1684

    3. By Michael Renzmann (86.127.185.145) mrenzmann@otaku42.de on http://madwifi.org

      > The comments regarding the difficulty of getting in touch with MadWifi accepted, I can't help thinking that these companies MUST (!) ...

      1. MadWifi is no company, it's a community-driven project.

      2. Personally, I have not received a single mail from Jem (but maybe I and my e-mail archive both just have an horribly bad memory). And I wonder why he didn't try to get in contact with us on our mailing list if contacting us via the published addresses didn't work out for him as he claims.

      Bye, Mike

  7. By Michael Pounov (62.213.185.4) misho@openbsd-bg.org on

    Hi, this "interview" is pathetic .... because .....

    I`m user,programmer and administrator, who uses primary OpenBSD as a Home System from version 2.6. Because of my patience and alternatives are almost over, so I prefer an another rock-solid OS NetBSD. The Reasons:
    -Pathetic Atheros support (is not worthy at all) :):):) Binary HAL works 100% solid in any mode.
    -Full absence of ISDN support, ATM or other teleco stacks and drivers
    -Low production performance of OS

    We are developing own distribution, based on OpenBSD for any different appliances (WiFi devices,VoIP gates, VPN concentrators and others), but since 1 year took we the hard way to migrate, as basic OS for our own distribution, to NetBSD. This seems to be very expansive according money, programmer hours and troubles. Finally we`ve got a satisfying result.

    And so long with OpenBSD for appliances.
    "Thanks" to all blind fans, who stay behind the utopic idea for BLOB and non use of 100% solid work binary HAL or code!!!

    Good Luck and many many sorry loving Puffy :-( I really love this OpenBSD OS. "Nothing personal this is only business ..."

    ------------------
    Michael Pounov
    AITNET - Software & Network Solutions

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (70.168.131.136) on

      No Michael, *you* are the pathetic one. If you cannot see how illogical your position is regarding binary blobs, then happy trails. Good bye, because you weren't really a true part of our community in the first place. Heck, you might as well go back to Microsoft.

      Bye!

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