> there are no Wifi-5+ chips on the market that can run without blobs This is true, but at the same time - undoubtedly - some chips are more likely to be liberated from blobs than the others. Some WiFi chip may have been partially researched (i.e. someone tried to reverse-engineer its binary blob) or at least a detailed-enough public PDF datasheet is available so that its clear how the hardware operates, while some other WiFi chip may lack these advantages and even use a firmware signature that prevents the binary blob replacement by the opensource alternative.
What I am afraid of, and what forces me to write e-mails like this once-in-a-while - is a POSSIBILITY that OpenWrt One project has not taken this "liberation-potential" into consideration while choosing a chip for a new router - and as result, it may turn out after that OpenWrt One project becomes popular and the people would like it to become blobless (i.e. by some crowdfunding initiative), but then find out it impossible to liberate because of some technical limitation like that firmware signature. > Could you please list the wifi chips you know of which ether have > a) completely open source firmware, or > b) no firmware at all (neither loaded in ram, nor in internal flash)? The best WiFi hardware capable of working on 100% opensource, I am aware of and using at the moment, is based on the chips of Atheros ath9k / ath9k_htc families: 1) Netgear WNDR3800 router, SoC : Atheros AR7161 rev 2, yes it is 802.11n but it supports 5 GHz, and my ISP is slower than 300 Mbps in any case (bought it locally but you may visit this page for a more complete description - shop [dot] vikings [dot] net/product/wndr3800-wlan-router/ ) This router runs on LibreCMC (fork of OpenWRT to designate the routers which could work on 100% opensource) and its U-Boot is blobless too AFAIK 2) AR9462 MiniPCIe WiFi module, also 802.11n with 5 GHz support, for G505S laptop with a coreboot opensource BIOS (btw this G505S is the most powerful coreboot-supported laptop without Intel ME/AMD PSP backdoors, has a quadcore AMD and up to 16/32GB RAM) 3) There are also ath9k-based USB adapters which work on 100% opensource, but those with 5 GHz support are rare (haven't been able to find in the wild) However, of course it does not mean that there is nothing newer than this "ath9k" that could theoretically work on 100% opensource without any blobs in userspace. A couple of years ago I've seen someone trying to reverse-engineer a newer chip's blob (think it was 802.11ac ), but a Google does not want me to find this page atm :P > And don't forget about the "bootROM", stored in silicon BootROM is considered by Free Software Foundation as a part of hardware, + it is not as bad as those bloated&buggy binary blobs running at your OpenWRT space On Thu, Apr 11, 2024 at 9:51 AM Piotr Dymacz <pep...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Hi, > > On 11.04.2024 10:52, Bjørn Mork wrote: > > Ivan Ivanov <qmaster...@gmail.com> writes: > > > >>> SOC: MediaTek MT7981B , Wi-Fi: MediaTek MT7976C > >> > >> Are these Mediateks capable of working without any binary blobs, at > >> least in theory? > > > > A simple question back to you: Could you please list the wifi chips you > > know of which ether have > > a) completely open source firmware, or > > b) no firmware at all (neither loaded in ram, nor in internal flash)? > > [...] > > And don't forget about the "bootROM", stored in silicon, taking care of > (among other things) booting the SoC from different media. > > -- > Cheers, > Piotr _______________________________________________ openwrt-devel mailing list openwrt-devel@lists.openwrt.org https://lists.openwrt.org/mailman/listinfo/openwrt-devel
