[Debian-eeepc-devel] Bits from the Debian Eee PC team, autumn 2008

[Luca Niccoli]

On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 2:35 AM, Ben Armstrong
<synrg at sanctuary.nslug.ns.ca> wrote:

> Besides, no Eee model that I know of uses an Atheros N chipset, so ath9k
> will not work for them.  Models 901, 1000 and 1000H use Ralink rt2860,
> as indicated in the table.  While the driver is GPL'd, unfortunately it
> embeds a non-free firmware.  There is no 100% open source solution for
> these devices yet.  I believe there is work in progress in
> compat-wireless, but nothing that works yet.

Does it use a binary firmware (running on the device memory and
controller) or a binary blob running on the host CPU?
In the former case, I'm afraid we'll have to live with that (as we do
with a lot of other drivers, most of which are included in the
kernel).
Not that I live this as a terrible ethical problem: by law wireless
hardware producers have to enforce FCC regulations beyond the
possibility of intervention by the user; they do this via a binary
firmware loaded at runtime, would have it been so different if they
were hardcoding the regulations in the hardware or they used a
persistent firmware (like most of us have in their CD-writer)?

Luca