RE: Broadcom BCM4306/BCM2050 support

David S. Miller
2003-04-29T10:54:51Z

On Mon, 2003-04-28 at 23:16, Martin List-Petersen wrote:
> > I couldn't find any Linux support for these WLAN chips with
> > google or on this lists archives. So I would like to ask it here:
>
> It seems, that the specs haven't been released yet. There are quite a few Wlan
> cards out there based on the Broadcom chips (nearly all cards, that support
> 802.11g), so it's quite a shame. (Actually this fits the the TrueMobile 1180,
> 1300 and 1400, speaking of Dell wireless lan cards).
...
> The same problem is with the Intel Prowireless 2100 (Centrino) WLan card. No
> Linux support available yet, which is another choice for the Dell notebooks at
> the moment.

Don't expect specs or opensource drivers for any of these pieces
of hardware until these vendors figure out a way to hide the frequency
programming interface.

Ie. these cards can be programmed to transmit at any frequency,
and various government agencies don't like it when f.e. users can
transmit on military frequencies and stuff like that.

The only halfway plausible idea I've seen is to not document the
frequency programming registers, and users get a "region" key file that
has opaque register values to program into the appropriate registers.
The file is per-region (one for US, Germany, etc.)and the wireless
kernel driver reads in this file to do the frequency programming.

So don't blame the vendors on this one, several of them would love
to publish drivers public for their cards, but simply cannot with
upsetting federal regulators.

--
David S. Miller <davem@redhat.com>