Broadcom wifi drivers in F-14?

[John W. Linville]

On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 08:49:46AM -0500, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 09:09:58 -0400,
>   "John W. Linville" <linville at redhat.com> wrote:
> > 
> > AIUI, they main technical reason that they were finally willing to
> > open-up was that they were able to add some regulatory enforcement code
> > in their firmware.  The added firmware functionality required more
> > firmware resources, and only the newer devices explicictly supported
> > by Broadcom's newly-released driver have enough firmware resources
> > to run it.
> 
> How does the firmware know where you are? Do you need different firmware
> for different markets?

Beats me...more likely, there is some sort of SKU-equivalent info
available to the firmware and a table of predefined regulatory rules
mapped to those SKUs.  This, of course, does nothing to prevent
situations where one is using values that are OK in your country of
origin but not in your current host country.  But I suppose that is
more of an import/export problem...?  Whatever.

> I hope the guys that reverse engineered the firmware that can be used
> as an alternative with the b43 driver keep working on it.

Me too.  If/when I find a way to alter time or speed-up the harvest
(or teleport me off this rock) I think I would enjoy working on that!
In the meantime, I hope someone else with applicable skills and
interests takes that opportunity.

John
-- 
John W. Linville		The truth will set you free, but first it will
linville at redhat.com			make you miserable. -- James A. Garfield