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Comment by alrs | Hacker News Reader

rtfm. Linux provides the architecture, the vendors ignore it and do it themselves.

The Intel drivers require blobs. Broadcom used to require blobs that you had to cut out of Windows drivers yourself, though I have no idea what that's like now.

The vendors use the excuse that this stuff requires FCC certification, and if they expose the low-level stuff some hax0rs will turn the wi-fi portion of the spectrum into CB radio circa 1979.

The OpenBSD guys used to recommend Atheros, because the specs were open. I have no idea what the current wisdom is. I run Thinkpads, which are BIOS-locked to only Lenovo provided cards, so I've been in iwl-land for a long time.

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The Atheros HAL was reverse engineered for OpenBSD. adrian@freebsd used to work at Atheros and managed to get them to open source their HAL. The code is now in FreeBSD where the HAL was a blob for years. AFAIK no hardware docs are available for people outside the company.

Ralink used to provide documentation on request. They've been acquired by Mediatek since. Mediatek allows OpenBSD to distribute binary firmware images under free terms (for the run(4) driver). Perhaps they'd still provide docs. I haven't asked yet.

Realtek's engineers tend to be kind and helpful, but they don't provide docs on request, citing NDAs, and management has ignored my requests. There are several open source drivers for Linux written by Realtek engineers which can be used as a reference but they are pretty large so studying them takes time.

Broadcom's open source drivers are unreadable to the point of being more or less equivalent to binary blobs. If you want to see why try to make sense of this file in Linux: drivers/netwireless/brcm80211/brcmsmac/phy/phy_n.c

Some broadcoms are decent, with blobs in the kernel. But it's pathetic they never implement power saving. Same tends to apply to Intel, sadly.

The result is that my system uses 1.5W more than if I ran OS X. Otherwise, I have very good power consumption, so it doesn't have an impact on overall battery range. But very annoying.

We can't blame NetworkManager on vendors, though. wicd seemed great for a while, but development on it just stopped at some point.

Maybe I should just spend some more time learning about wireless and see if I can hack on wicd or create something new rather than just mourning its loss.

which thinkpad are you using which locks to intel cards?

I know that's a pretty common occurrence of thinkpads, but I hadn't heard one that was strictly manufacture specific. Most thinkpads i've encountered are "Use Intel 5400AGN OR Broadcom'blahblahblah',not 'Use Intel Only', and all of those thinkpads i've experienced that with have had BIOS reflash available to work around that particular problem.

p.s. this message isn't intended for snark, it's intended to allow me to skip whichever thinkpad it is that's locked down. My bets are on one of the thin cant-take-the-battery-out ultrabook 'ThinkPads', but we'll see!

Locks to "Lenovo provided" cards, I said. That leaves Lenovo-branded iwl or some rando Lenovo-branded Realtek(?) card that has terrible support.

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