From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Linus Torvalds Subject: Re: brcm80211 breakage.. Date: Thu, 12 Jan 2012 09:31:12 -0800 Message-ID: References: <4F0D6806.4080201@broadcom.com> <4F0DC030.6090500@lwfinger.net> <4F0E3B7E.8040005@lwfinger.net> <4F0E5E57.9060204@lwfinger.net> <4F0EDC75.3040003@broadcom.com> <4F0F15E6.30301@lwfinger.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Cc: Arend van Spriel , "John W. Linville" , Network Development , "Franky (Zhenhui) Lin" , =?ISO-8859-2?Q?Rafa=B3_Mi=B3ecki?= To: Larry Finger Return-path: Received: from mail-gy0-f174.google.com ([209.85.160.174]:62746 "EHLO mail-gy0-f174.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751860Ab2ALRbd (ORCPT ); Thu, 12 Jan 2012 12:31:33 -0500 Received: by ghbg16 with SMTP id g16so413231ghb.19 for ; Thu, 12 Jan 2012 09:31:33 -0800 (PST) In-Reply-To: <4F0F15E6.30301@lwfinger.net> Sender: netdev-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 9:18 AM, Larry Finger wrote: > > For completeness, sromctrl is 0x12, thus bit 1 (SRC_PRESENT) is not set, and > my device has an OTP, not an SPROM. So this is again something that apple is *famous* for. They try to control their hardware very tightly, and OS X will (for example) not use non-apple wireless cards as "Airport" cards, and will do things like dropping features ("Oh, you tried to save money by buying a generic wireless minipci card instead of the apple branded one? Well, that's fine, but now I'll make your network flaky and will refuse to support 802.11n just to make a point."). Never mind that the hardware is the same - they'll literally look at the PCI subvendor ID and things like that, and if it doesn't say "Apple", they will simply not enable all the features, or won't even connect to it. They've done this forever. Others do it too (I think both HP and IBM have done the exact same thing with minipci wireless cards - back when WiFi used to be a "premium" thing in a laptop, and vendors charged quite a bit extra for it, gah!). But Apple does it for a *lot* of things, presumably because they want to make it extra hard for clone makers (or just tinkerers that would try to run OS X on a regular PC that just happened to have the exact same hardware as a Macbook). Seriously. I really like my Macbook Air hardware, but the moment some non-apple supplier makes anything comparable, I'll drop it like the crap it is. Exactly because Apple uses software to make it harder to use. Installing Linux on that thing is "interesting" - Linux works perfectly fine on it, but with all the special Apple firmware crap, you have to jump through hoops. > I do not see anything wrong with commit 888153b3db3f, but I realize that my > card really does not test any of those changes. I suspect the big change is the version check and the size of the sprom image. Apple probably has an older version. I assume that the subvendor ID etc comes from the srom? Linus