On Thu, Apr 29, 2004 at 07:44:17AM -0400, Alicia da Conceicao wrote:
> > i was wondering if there were plans to support the intel wireless network card.
> > Looking at the mailing list archives, the reason why not supported was that 
> > intel was not giving out the specs.
> > It seems that this has changed since there is now a sourceforge project dealing 
> > with that (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ipw2100/).
>  
> Dear Renaud:
> 
> I seriously doubt it.  The Intel Centrino Wi/Fi cards are primarily software
> based, in that they do not have their own processor, and need to use the main
> CPU.  Think of the Centrino Wi/Fi cards as the wireless equivalent of those
> cheapo win-modems that don't have UARTS to save on parts.  In the Windows
> drivers, Intel implimented a lot of specialized software controling the radio
> for the Wi/Fi.  Because of this, Intel will likely never release any truly
> opensource driver (for Linux or *BSD), since they do not want any of their
> competitors to use their driver radio software to impliment their own cheapo
> processor-less Wi/Fi cards.  And if Intel did release the source it would
> likely violate many broadcasting rules (CRTC-Canada, FCC-US, etc.) in
> different countries since users could hack up the radio software in the
> driver to make illegal broadcasts, especially on different frequences.

The IPW2100 is microcontroller-based.  Its architecture resembles the
Lucent/Prism chipset, AFAICT.  Maybe you are talking about some other
Wifi chipset?

BTW, neither Intel nor anybody else needs to let loose the intellectual
property in their MAC firmware.  A portable, open source 802.11 MAC
in C can be written and ported to the Lucent/Intersil/Atmel/Intel WiFi
microcontrollers, if only we can get the docs.

Dave

-- 
David Young             OJC Technologies
dyoung@ojctech.com      Urbana, IL * (217) 278-3933