Intel Releases Linux Driver For Centrino WLAN

Werner Heuser writes "Finally Intel has made their different announcements about Linux support for the WLAN part of the Centrino technology become true. Though not yet officially announced an Open-Source driver with included firmware is available at SourceForge. The driver is still experimental and supposed to work with 2.4 Kernels as well as with 2.6 ones." (See these previous stories for some background.)

Opensource

[gspr]

Wow, I thought people were saying the official Intel driver would be proprietary (at least to start off with). Such a positive surprise! If only I had the cash for a laptop... *sigh*

NDISWRAPPER

[cuban321]

Until these drivers stabilize you can use NDISWRAPPER [sourceforge.net].

This tool allows you to run the Windows driver for some wireless cards that have little or no Linux support.

Daniel

No WEP

[gspr]

WEP currently no support
Notice how WEP support is not yet done [sourceforge.net].

Re:No WEP

[michich]

WEP is weak. Use OpenVPN [sourceforge.net] if you can.

Don't bother yet, its not finished

[Anonymous Coward]

TODO

- long/short preamble support
- enhance wireless extension support
- adhoc
- encryption (WEP)
- continue to add support for addtional SW RF kill switch implementations
- "shared" authentication
- transmit power control
- power states support (ACPI)

Yes you read that right. So is there anything this driver does do?

After promising and promising to support Linux we get this. A crappy not finished driver. I suppose I'm supposed to be happy that Intel finally started to work on this after like what, a year after we should have had support? Sorry Intel but screw off. I already bought a PCMCIA Wireless NIC. And I'm sure as heck not going to replace it with you crappy nic and unfinished drivers. Thanks for nothing. Next notebook I buy is going to be AMD powered.

Re:Open Source Driver + Firmware

[alex_tibbles]

to answer my own question (partly):
"As the firmware is licensed under a restricted use license, it can not be included within the kernel sources. To enable the IPW2100 you will need a firmware image to load into the wireless NIC's processors." From http://ipw2100.sourceforge.net/README.ipw2100 [sourceforge.net].
And look at the firmware license [sourceforge.net]!

Re:Hardly Intel...

[javatips]

My first reaction was the same as yours... But if you browse at the end of the page and hover your mouse on the maintainer name, you'll see that he has an Intel e-mail address.

So yes Intel is, kind of, supporting Linux driver for the Centrino chip as the pay the guy...

However, I don't beleive this is a priority for them. If it was so, they would have released something that is fully functional... What it seems to me is that they are paying one guy to do it and hope the OS community will jump in and help them out! I don't see any real corporate backing behind this project.

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[/dev/trash]

Read the article.....it's not really there yet.

RTFSource before you post

[petard]

Copyright(c) 2003 - 2004 Intel Corporation. All rights reserved.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free
Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option)
any later version.


Just because they've not put their name all over the site in no way makes this "not released by intel".

You're missing reading comprhension skills

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the source:


Copyright(c) 2003 - 2004 Intel Corporation. All rights reserved.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free
Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option)
any later version.


Look at the maintainer's email address. Now consider what you're missing.

Re:Stealing Windows Driver

[Gerald]

Have you tried capturing raw 802.11 frames with NdisWrapper? (Hint: Most Windows drivers don't support this, since NDIS doesn't provide a standard interface for it. Most Linux and FreeBSD drivers do.)

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[Florian Weimer]

I'm impressed. A real open-source driver from a major company...

You haven't browsed the Linux source code lately, have you?

There are at least two other Intel drivers in them.

Re:Woo hoo

[tedric]

You shouldn't have any trouble with the T41. At least my model works great. IBM (Germany) had a special offer including SuSE Pro 9 (the standard box). Additionally to that I got a special T40/T41 CD that repartitioned the harddrive (15GB Win XP, 45GB Linux ;)) and installed SuSE with all necessary modules. It went really great, no trouble at all.

Also check out www.linux-on-laptops.com. Especially for IBM laptops there are lots of pages out there describing linux installations for various distributions in-depth.

Btw: I ordered my T40p with the optional 802.11a/b/g card (standard is a/b) and installed FC1 - not because SuSE is bad, just because I'm used to RH. The card is manufactured by Philips and works just fine with the modules from madwifi (visit SourceForge). Well, with kernel 2.4.*, I still have some trouble with kernel 2.6.*.

Re:What about Broadcom?

[j0hndoe]

Here's a source: [cemper.com]

In general the following chipsets are supported:

* Broadcom
* Intel PRO/Wireless Lan (Centrino)
* Atheros
* Admtek 8211

Re:Open Source??

[michich]

In a post to LKML James Ketrenos said this:

Yes, it is really firmware. It is loaded from disk as a block of data and passed to the card. The system CPU doesn't execute anything out of the firmware, nor does the firmware know anything about the kernel.

Re:Thanks, Intel...

[sxpert]

the firmware is closed source because this is rendered compulsory by the military. furthermore, the firmware runs INSIDE THE CARD, which is similar to the software that runs your printer.

Re:Open Source Driver + Firmware

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux already contains firmware blobs for things like SCSI cards and CPU microcode.

Most Linux developers are fine with this -- you have to draw the line between software and hardware somewhere, and the firmware (or BIOS) interface seems like a logical place to do it.

Re:Open Source Driver + Firmware

[david.given]

Is this a full driver or is the firmware a subtle way of making a closed-source driver?

That's a rather more complicated question than you might think.

The way most wireless cards work is that there's some radio hardware, hooked up to a microprocessor on the card that handles the low-level 802.11 frames, and some host software that talks to the microprocessor.

The microprocessor --- which tends to be an embedded ARM, these days --- runs a tiny nearly-an-operating-system out of flash or RAM. If RAM, then you need to download the microprocessor's code when you power up the card. That's the firmware.

This has a number of advantages: it means that the crucial, real-time processing is done with a custom processor that doesn't have to worry about running user code; it means that the vendor can change the hardware without having to change the driver, because the driver's just talking to a well-defined interface provided by the microprocessor; and it means that it's much easier to make cross-platform drivers.

It also means that the vendor can hide stuff in the firmware that they really, really don't want the user to play with. Such as the power, channel and timing settings that are mandated by the FCC.

I don't know if there are any wireless vendors out there who actually release source code to their firmware. (I'd be interested to find out if there are.) Which means that the answer to your question is both yes and no: the firmware's not open source, but the driver is.

Open source?

[Anonymous Coward]

More like an open-source interface to a closed-source firmware.
You still have to go here [sf.net], agree to a EULA and download a binary image to be able to use this module (I found it humorous that Intel's download site admonished me for using Firefox on linux, and suggested I upgrade to IE6 or NS6).
You use the driver by doing:
modprobe ipw2100 firmware=/usr/share/firmware/ipw2100-1.0.fw
where ipw2100-1.0.fw is the current binary firmware image.

Re:Intel Feeling the Pressure?

[John Hurliman]

K3b allows you to emulate a floppy disk on CDROM by burning a DOS bootdisk image to CD. When it boots you have A:\ which is the contents of the image file, and if CDROM drivers were loaded you have another drive letter for the the rest of the CD contents. I flashed the BIOS on my laptop from a Linux only environment like this.

Re:Open Source??

[T5]

Keyspan [keyspan.com] USB to serial converters are like this as well. This sparked a lot of debate on lkml on whether the firmware, clearly not open source, could be included in the kernel driver code. The upshot of that lengthy discussion [debian.org] was that yes, firmware can be bundled in the kernel code since it's not actually run by the host processor that's running the kernel.

Re:Intel Feeling the Pressure?

[Ktulu_03]

http://www.k3b.org/

Re:*BSD Driver?

[Imperator]

Well since they're giving you a closed firmware with an open interface, presumably you can code a driver to it. Or you can just port the Linux driver.

Re:Intel Feeling the Pressure?

[Mysticalfruit]

The correct format for a CDROM where the first track is bootable (and presented by the BIOS) as a 1.44MB floppy is called "El Torito"

Boy oh boy, were those IBMer's wacky...

Re:*BSD Driver?

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Just use Bill Paul's NDISulator (available in reasonably recent -CURRENT or 5.3 - you're running 5.x on your laptop, aren't you?) with the Windows driver. You'll never notice a difference.

Re:From ipw2100_main.c

[Ben Hutchings]

Haven't you ever used a circular buffer before? r and w are the read and write positions within the buffer; e is the "end of oldest BD entry" (BD = buffer descriptor, at a guess). The condition for throwing out a "BD entry" is that the end of it is within the free space in the buffer after w and before r, allowing for wrap-around.

Re:Does it work?

[gyrojoe]

Despite the comments from many posters that it is "incomplete" it does indeed work. It seems like they are making the driver a priority too. I emailed James Ketrenos (the Intel developer listed on the page) about a segfault I got in the wireless tools (my fault mostly). His response was quite fast and very promising: "[the fix] may not make it into 0.30 today, but a fix should be in 0.31 tomorrow. Seems to me like the driver is progressing quickly and is somewhat of a priority for Intel.
Even if it uses binary firmware, this is still better than using ndiswrapper/DriverLoader to emulate the Windows driver.

Re:standards?

[TeddyR]

instead of mouthing off, maybe linking to the LSB standards page [linuxbase.org] that contains the specifications. Thing is, you probably mean theFilesystem Hierarchy Standard [pathname.com] /etc/firmware may not be in either documents, but since it is used by MANY rpms, including the kernel-util rpms for microcode data it is the de-facto standard for binary firmware images that need to be accessed by device drivers at boot time....