How does FC run on Dell Insiration?

[Todd Zullinger]

Dotan Cohen wrote:
> On 28/11/06, Erik Hemdal <ehemdal at townisp.com> wrote:
[...]
>>As I understand it, Intel has to do it this way so that they can
>>have an open-source driver and still maintain compliance with
>>radio-interference regulations.  I'm not an expert about the rules,
>>but I have seen RF interference cause some really difficult problems
>>at work, so I don't minimize that requirement.
> 
> Ah, have people been hacking the open source driver to make it more
> powerful? Ruining everybody else's good time just to boot their own
> signal? You'll have them in every lot.

I don't know that there is any evidence of that happening.  It's more
likely a CYA decision on the part of Intel's lawyers.  There's an
article on kerneltrap about an OpenBSD developer, Damien Bergamini,
creating a driver that didn't need this binary daemon[1].  He suggests
that Intel used the binary daemon "probably because they wanted to
reduce the complexity of their firmware which were bloated and buggy."

The binary daemon is the one big strike against the ipw3945.  If I'd
have done my homework better I would have avoided this card because of
that.  For the Dell's, the alternative is the Broadcom-based card
which is only recently working with an open-source driver, so that
would have meant choosing a different brand of laptop entirely.

I have read that the binary daemon may be going away at some point
though, as there's no way the driver will make it into the mainline
kernel with such a requirement.  But I don't know the status of that.

-- 
Todd        OpenPGP -> KeyID: 0xBEAF0CE3 | URL: www.pobox.com/~tmz/pgp
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