Linux Centrino Driver Update

Edy52285 writes "An article on News.com talks about how Intel has been, and still is, dragging on releasing their Linux drivers for Centrino. Intel is reluctant to release its drivers as open source since doing so would reveal secrets about their wireless hardware. Linux in currently unable to take advantage of Centrino's wireless networking devices, without, that is, prying $20 from your thin wallet to buy Linuxant's DriverLoader (discussed in an earlier story). Will Swope (Intel's General Manager of Software and Solutions Group) said in an interview said "What I believe will happen is we will end up having a Linux compatibility driver that is not open source at first, then designing future drivers in such a way that they are open source but will not expose intellectual property," Intel seem to be taking its time on releasing the drivers, and even in the article, there is a lack of any commitment on a date or under what conditions the drivers will be released." Also, someone pointed out that it's worth checking out ndiswrapper for the driver.

Secrets?

What secrets are these? Back doors for governments? Insecurities? What could be so bad that the open source movement can't see it?

Re:Secrets?

Hardware details -- it's like a chef not wanting to talk about his latest recipie, because that's the big secret. Sure, you and I probably don't have the cookware (hardware fab plant), but other restaurants (AMD and Qualcomm) would probably be very interested.

Re:Secrets?

I know that the word is taboo around here, but isn't this precicely what (hardware) patents are for? From what I understand, they are pretty easy to get.

Re:Secrets?

They could patent everything, but for that they must disclose the technology, and it is no longer secret. No reverse engineering needed - just go grab a copy of the patent application. Clearly they do patent many things. Still, it stands to reason that they some parts of a technology will be kept as trade secrets at least for some period of time.

--It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.

Re:Secrets?

If the other restaurants are interested by any means, they already bought a couple of Centrino devices and crack-opened them. One of the most exciting jobs within bigger companies is the reverse engineering department. (Of course, the legal claim for that dept is not to do industrial espionage but to detect copyright frauds of the evil competitor...)

Trying to obscure hardware by only handing out binary-only drivers and hiding the API from the average programmer does not help at all against professional counterfeiting / industrial espionage. But it's quite amusing to see a company like Intel play the security-by-obscurity song.

They should know better.

Re:Secrets?

Odds are Intel does know better than you armchair engineers.

Having worked there up until a few years ago, I'd say that most of them agree with the "armchair engineers" and think it's silly to try to hide stuff this way. But there are (lets see, where's that Post Anonymously button?) flaming morons in various management positions (mostly marketing) that are totally clueless. AMD, et al. have the resources to disassemble the binary only drivers anyway, so the only thing you are doing is slowing the adoption by technically oriented users, but they can not / will not see this.

We even had people like Linus, ESR, BP, etc. come out and do dog & pony shows about why it's a Good Idea to open things like this up, but the only thing that seems to be working is a gradual process of selective retirement of the morons. (Intel's culling process to rid itself of the clueless can best be described as "brutal".) Saddly (since I still have stock & and friends in Intel) there is a fair voluntary exodus of the cluefull as well.

-- Anonomous Coward

P.S. The funniest part of the dog & pony show was when one of the PHPs listed among the downside of open sourcing the "fact" that it would piss off MS.

The legal department people who were there were not clueless and came down on the poor idiot like a ton of lead. From the hurt look on his face I think he expected them to side with him.

Re:Secrets?

(AMD and Qualcomm) would probably be very interested.

Those guys are probably the least interested. Their engineers know exactly how to make similar devices. The only ones that might be interested are some third world country's bootleg industry. And they can/will reverse engineer the devices anyhow.

All these "Oh, we can't release the specs, that would reveal our secrets!", are pretty full of it. There are very, very few hardware/software solutions that aren't widely known. It gets really silly when companies such as NVidia refuse to release info to the XFree community, due to their hardware secrets. For heaven's sake! Even the insides of such (more or less) proprietary devices as the PS2, the GameCube, and so on are well known...

Re:Secrets?

Controlling a microwave radio with bits on a data bus from a digital processor issuing an interrupt signal is an invention and highly protected intellectual property. Please respect that. Jobs are at stake.

Re:Secrets?

Please respect that. Jobs are at stake.

Well, they were. The last of the engineers were fired last Thursday.

Re:Secrets?

Much of the actual work of the Centrino wireless hardware is performed in software, much like the "Winmodems" that were so widespread a few years ago (and, I guess, still are - does anyone make a modem with an actual UART on it anymore?) Intel is hesitant to provide the information that will allow people to write a driver for Linux, because that information would necessarily provide 100% of the software engineering necessary for someone else to create a Centrino-like hardware solution.

Re:Secrets?

"Intel is hesitant to provide the information that will allow people to write a driver for Linux, because that information would necessarily provide 100% of the software engineering necessary for someone else to create a Centrino-like hardware solution."

Well, that sucks for them. Perhaps they should have built a real wireless device rather than taking away CPU time for something that is best handled by a seperate device.

This revealed, do most linux users even want a Centrino-based laptop?

Re:Secrets?

This revealed, do most linux users even want a Centrino-based laptop?

Hells yeah! I'm within a year of replacing my old PIII 550Mhz Compaq laptop, which has been a trusty and faithful machine until recently but is now starting to give me hardware problems.
My next machine would be a Dell 300M running SUSE because it's ultra-portable, but thanks to Intel dragging their feet my next machine will probably be a G5 powerbook running Fink. Actually, Dell gets part-credit. Their recent quality control problems have made me suspect the reliability of their hardware.
That's the way the market works. Hey Intel, thanks for playing, but this ball just went over the fence!

Re:Secrets?

The whole point of the Centrino setup is its lowpower Wifi. I think this will be moot in the
next generation of laptops considering Broadcom & Philips [com.com] have already cooked up
their own even lower power chipset.

I won't make any claims on the validity of these numbers [216.239.41.104]{---Google Cache
Since i couldn't find the Yahoo Article they mention
- $12 a chipset
- 97% less power consumption than Intel Centrino in standby mode
- 70% less transmit power consumption
- 90% less receive power consumption
- 802.11g "not that far away"
~And this was October 2003

Re:Secrets?

Err, the whole point of "Centrino" is marketing, pure and simple.

The term "Centrino" is a 100% pure marketing term. There is absolutely ZERO technology connected to it, it just means that you are using an Intel Pentium M processor with a an Intel motherboard chipset and an Intel wifi chip.

The trick behind all this though is that if you combine those three elements then Intel will give you MUCHO-$$$ for marketing purposes. Last year Intel gave out $300 million to the likes of Toshiba and Dell to market their Centrino laptops I would not be at all surprised if it turned out that it was CHEAPER to add in an Intel WiFi chip than to have no wifi chip at all once you factor in the advertising bonuses. So that $12 Broadcom chip could well be $14 or $15 more expensive than an Intel one.

I stand corrected

I found this explanation through google: forums.designtechnica.com [designtechnica.com]

Just a clarification about the whole Centrino thing...just so people have a clear understanding of it.

Centrino is an Intel brand/platform for promoting mobile wireless technologies. So, it's really not a specific chipset but rather a set of different technologies designed to work together to promote longer battery life without sacrificing performance and good wireless performance (in terms of signal strength).

Currently, Intel demands that for a product to carry the Centrino moniker, they must have 3 things: a Pentium M mobile processor, an Intel designed supporting chipset (currently the 855GM/PM), and an Intel designed wireless chipset (currently the PROWireless 2100 and 2200).

If you change out any one of those components you don't get the blue and pink sticker. The most common part to change out is the wireless card since up until recently it only support 802.11b. If a manufacturer does this, they can have a Pentium M sticker for their product.

Another misconception is that "wireless" is built into the "Centrino chipset". This is untrue from the point of view that the wireless chipset is not part of the 855GM/PM northbridge chipset nor the Intel southbridge. The Intel PROWireless 2100 chipset is nothing more than a miniPCI Wifi card (like everyone else's card). You can easily change out Intel's card for any other industry standard miniPCI card. To Intel's credit, even though it's only 802.11b (for the most part), the performance of their product (in terms of antenna strength and throughput performance) is very good and much better than the consumer crap (i.e. and PRISM based chipset) that was put out before it.

So, while it's ok to say "Centrino processor" or "Centrino chipset" you should know that it is an umbrella term that refers to a specific set of technologies and not an actual product.

Re:Secrets?

Perhaps they should have built a real wireless device rather than taking away CPU time for something that is best handled by a seperate device.

Intel's entire strategy over the last 10 years has been precisely to move as many functions as possible into the CPU. This enables them to justify selling processors with far more horsepower than anybody needs for word processing or browsing, and it lets them assert control and influence over a much larger fraction of the hardware market.

That's why they keep adding more multimedia-oriented units to their architecture; it's also why they designed the P4's memory architecture to be mainly good at streaming blocks of video data.

Their strategy has been relatively successful up to now. There's just no way that they would design a totally stand-alone wireless solution to be tightly marketed with their CPUs.

In fact, just from the Centrino marketing material, you'd get the impression that the CPU itself is handling the wireless functions. Perhaps they plan to move that logic into a future mobile CPU chip.

Re:Secrets?

AFAIK, the radio emissions from the wireless card are regulated (by the FCC in the US?) so as to avoid interference with other spectrum users. Much of this regulation is acheived through the close-source drivers.
Using modified drivers, it would be possible to make the card emit different frequencies or more power, thereby violating the usage licence.

ndiswrapper

Linux in currently unable to take advantage of Centrino's wireless networking devices, without, that is, prying $20 from your thin wallet to buy Linuxant's DriverLoader

Not true. I'm using the open-source ndiswrapper [sf.net] project together with the win32 drivers, and it works, although a bit buggy. See here [ucl.ac.uk]

Re:ndiswrapper

So we get all the bugginess of a windows driver giftwrapped in the bugginess of a linux alpha wrapper...

1. Don't give specifications away
2. Tech-savvy high-end linux users don't buy your product
3. ???
4. Profit???

Re:ndiswrapper

1. Don't give specifications away
2. Tech-savvy high-end linux users don't buy your product
3. ???
4. Profit???

Unfortunately, it's more like this:

1. Create new device that isn't very well implemented and give it a meaningless marketting name
2. Release Windows drivers so that your OEMs can use it in Windows.
3. Let OEMs market it to their sheep customers who just go with it without bothering to research things, not realising that it really isn't anything better than before but go "oooh! Intel!"
4. Profit.

And thus...

...I won't buy a "Centrino" laptop. That's fine, since Apple's laptops are looking more appealing anyway, and still run Linux. Some of those new AMD offerings in mobile computing, as well as Tranmeta's installation in some of the Sony lines make them nice options as well.

Which brings up a good point...

Why should anyone be surprised that a company that makes its money off of proprietary designs should be at odds with a movement to wrest control away from proprietary vendors?

Isn't this why Stallman insists on running only Free software?

Re:Which brings up a good point...

No its not....

Intel has made it very clear when they announced the Centrino chipset they would support Linux.
Well they haven't, their video chipset has a broken bios and no documentation and their wireless chipset has no documentation.
For the videochip there is some binary only stuff that only works with a very limited set of kernels and X versions.
For the wireless chip there still isn't even a driver.

The promises are getting dated and the hardware is getting dated. The only thing new comming out of intel is PR bullshit.

Jeroen

Open Source NdisWrapper that supports Intel

Intel PRO/Wireless Lan (Centrino)
For more info:
http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/

ndiswrapper

http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

This is an open source implementation that allows linux users to load their windows drivers and use their WiFi cards.

Its still very new, but there has been some success with the centrino chipset, as well as Admtek, Atheros and Broadcom cards.

And precompiled?

Why don't they do like nVidia, release a pre-compiled binary driver core and an open-source, compilable interface, which hopefully will manage to unify all diferences between different kernel versions and distros ?

Alvie

Re:And precompiled?

That would be more then fine with me, it's not like using the nVidia drivers makes you an outcast. nVidia is one of the most praised big names because they have been actively supporting Linux with their hardware for about 4 years.
If Intel would step up and prove that they support Linux, it would be a huge boost for Linux and extra appreciation for Intel from the Linux community. Even if they release a beta for Linux, you know that a large portion of users will actively assist in the testing and send in bug reports.

Simple solution

We had exactly this problem.

Our solution was to write a proprietry driver, and then write a wrapper for this to interface it to the kernel. Release the wrapper under the GPL, then release our proprietry software as closed source.

Simple answer, Don't buy nutrino laptops!

Only buy opensource supported products. The demand
will drive the market. This is also what we would need to do as soon as the PC gets locked up with
the new Award Bios. Demand has to be so low that it
will just about drive the home PC vendors out of business. then and only then DRM will be dropped.

I'm stocking up on some hardware now, that way if my
desktop or firewall does die, I can build a new one.

Re:Simple answer, Don't buy nutrino laptops!

you miss the fact that the vast majority of people who buy these laptops don't care. When 95% of customers don't care, the 5% who do are ignored because of the profit that the majority brings.

Commitment on a date

there is a lack of any commitment on a date

Looks like they're working in the same spirit as open source developers though...

The one language they understand

Think like a capitalist and vote with your wallet.

Until they have a proper Linux driver, buy an AMD based system instead.

Re:The one language they understand

Actually, instead of buying a Centrino laptop, I just bought a Pentium-M laptop, i.e. the CPU is fine, all you have to do is get a non-Intel card with it.

Who are they hiding this from?

What trade secrets is Intel trying to protect? From whom?

Other chipmakers, I presume. So that nobody could produce an alternative wireless card to go with a Pentium M processor or some such.

But wouldn't anyone who's capable of designing and producing his own chipset be able to dissect the Centrino architecture and reengineer it, either by careful blackbox testing or by actually taking a microscope and looking at the chips? Am I way off mark here?

But if it's not other chipmakers they are protecting this from, if it actually is a software issue, then they are simply dancing to the tune of Microsoft due to whatever behind-the-scenes agreement they have with them.

Much ado about...

In all honesty, I can't see what is so special about Centrino that Intel wants to keep it so secret.

It's a freaken' wireless chipset and a power efficient CPU. It's not like no one else makes them.

not so bad

What I believe will happen is we will end up having a Linux compatibility driver that is not open source at first, then designing future drivers in such a way that they are open source but will not expose intellectual property

So in other words, Intel is considering open source projects in the future. Isn't this news to get a little excited about?

How often in the past have companies brushed aside Linux? Many, many times. It gives me a bit of a fuzzy feeling inside to see guys like this being honest and forthright towards the Linux community.

I know in the short term it would be great if they would give us a bit more respect, but look a little further down the road...big companies are feeling pressure to do things the open-source way.

Do it like M-Systems...

M-Systems' DiscOnChips are very nice flash chips which we use in some ThinClients. While there is support for those in the 2.4.x kernel tree it never worked for us. So we took M-Systems drivers.

Now they seem to be in a similar boat: they don't like to give out their intellectual property. Their solution is what looks like a driver stub and a binary .o file which is the real driver which does the real work. This way you can build kernel modules for you favourite kernel with M-Systems not releasing any "critical" source code.

This practice means that you can't compile the driver into the kernel, you have to build a module (since the GPL does not allow building that propietary driver into the GPL'ed kernel, but allows non-GPL'ed kernel modules since they are not part of the resulting program or so... at least this what I recall Linus saying about that subject).

But having a module does the job as well, using an initrd we can boot from M-Systems DoC perfectly (in Real Mode they are accessible like a harddisk). The extra-effort is worth it since in our experience they are a lot more reliable than Flash IDE Chips, and reliablity is an important factor in embedded systems like ThinClients :-)

Intel could do it the same way: release a driver stub and a binary .o file which links together a kernel module. Et voila: Neutrino support for every kernel without releasing the real source code !

Free Hardware

If we believe that software should be free, i.e. open and accessible to anyone, either for ethical reasons or simply because it will result in better technology, then I don't see why hardware should be any different. This world would be a better place if I had an enforceable right to get the specs of my car, my fridge, or my laptop, if I so desire.

Shame on Intel

Intel has been using linux to bring up there new products for years. If they want to protect there ip then the least they can do is release a driver in the manner of the nvidia driver is release. Sure I would perfer a total open source driver but baby steps would be ok for now.

FreeBSD users have an option:

Read this post [freebsd.org] about using the Windows NDIS centrino driver (and other drivers) on FreeBSD, using the "NDISulator" (a.k.a. "Project Evil"). See this post [freebsd.org] for details on Project Evil. And unlike the linuxant thing, this is free.

buy "wireless ready"

Why support a company that doesn't support Linux on the desktop? When I bought my x31 think nearly a year ago, the intel wireless driver mess was still up in the air. The company was giving extremely mixed signals, so I decided to buy my laptop wireless rdy. I ended up buying a minipci Dell trumobile 1150 off ebay that uses the orinoco chipset. I saved $40 and got a card that worked with Linux.

The whole Centrino bit is a textbook monopolist tactic called a tying agreement [lectlaw.com]. Intel can skirt around it because its still offering the pentium-m, but with no marketing support. The general customer is really confused and assumes that if the laptop does not have the centrino sticker, its not the best one.

Prism 54g

Better yet, get a Prism based [prism54.org] WLAN card. Then you will even have 802.11g, which the Centrino doesn't have, AFAIK.

These card are relatively inexpensive. There's no particular reason to pick a Centrino laptop because of the built-in WLAN support.

Stuck on WinXP

I've been a Linux zealot since 1995, but just two annoying things have forced me to spend 90% of my time booted into my WinXP partition on my Panasonic toughbook:

- swsusp is not reliable. Sorry, but I can't be patient when my fucking laptop hangs on the 2nd or 3rd resume. Cold booting and shutting down is just too damned slow, so I rarely bother anymore.
- lack of Centrino support. Bastards at Intel! I would not have purchased this laptop if I knew I would have gotten shafted on Linux support -- especially when I was under the impression Intel was Linux-friendly!)

Oh, and I guess a 3rd problem has begun to rear its ugly head now that I'm getting into video capture and editing via firewire. Namely driver support and applications. :-/

Ah, but I'll never give up Linux on the server OR my main desktop.

Notebooks

Are a pain in the ass. I noticed this the day a colleague tried to install Windows 1900 on a "Made for XP" notebook. OEM drivers were nowhere to be found, and all the new drivers refused to install because they were "optimized for XP." The CDs that came with the machine were only "disk image restore" CDs. so re-installing the OS was impossible.

Linux (Red Hat 9), of course, installed without so much as an extra line feed, and supported each and every device perfectly. This was a fairly new notebook as well. It was amazing.

Can't figure out why manufacturers go out of their way to make it difficult for people to work with their own computers the way they want. Centrino should be supported, especially with notebooks being as expensive as they are.

Solve Linux notebook issues: get a PowerBook

This article brought a sly grin to my face. I've been using Linux since 1997 on servers, desktop PCs and notebooks. Struggling to get all the hardware in a system working properly was par for the course. 3 months ago I bought an Apple 12" PowerBook, running OS X. And I haven't looked back.

Since then I haven't wasted a single second searching for drivers or wrestling with hardware to get it to work. Sleep and restore works 100% of the time. Bluetooth and wireless LAN are bulletproof. I'd almost forgotten what it was like until I read this article.

secrets?!

What could they so desperately want to keep secret? Usually there's just no reason for a hardware manufacturer wanting to keep secret the information necessary to write a driver. When they do this, it's out of ignorance (or sometimes Microsoft threats, but I havn't heard evidence of this happening lately).

What could Intel's motivation be? Is it to hide a huge flaw, or to hide a huge security vulnerability such as backdoored encryption?

Intel - bad carma - Windows

Intel has partnered with M$ before and it doesn't supprise me they have a slow down going on supporting the Linux platform. Once I heard Intel was embracing, making special strides, supporting Windows DRM in their chips I decided my next purchase would not be an Intel.

Their company statement that they whole heartedly support DRM and will include it in their chips gave me pause. I don't want my CPU deciding and or regulating my morality. I certainly don't want my CPU playing digital overseer. It has enough to do running my PC.

And now, there's a reluctance and slow down supporting Linux with their chip. And after their partnership with M$ this doesn't supprise me.

It may well be that Intel will become the Windows CPU and AMD and/or others will be for the rest of us.

It's like a bad date.

Distrust begets distrust. Secrets beget snooping. If someone (Intel) is going to be so damned hypocritical and lavish in Linux's support of it's product lines (especially the nice early Itanium support while Microsoft was getting is OS finished) they had better not complain when someone "hacks" a solution out of the chip.

It's like the who DVD-CSS mess. Linux people just wanted to be able to watch DVD's without runnning Windows. What resulted was a hack that made convertion of DVD's into cheap Divx copies easy and painless.

It feels like dating someone who never trusts you, never earns your trust (or respect) and goes hysterical when you don't behave exactly how they want. Reminds me of an ex-girlfriend, frankly.

Ohh spare cycles, yummy!

The problem lies in Intels inherent desire to eat spare cpu cycles. Why? Because the more cpu cycles wasted on things better handled in hardware the more incentive to upgrade your cpu.

Those spare cycles could do something better than doing the hardwares work. Microsoft wants to have it all in windows if they can. That way they can tie the whole platform to windows cementing the monopoly on desktops. MS and Intel have had their jousts and Intel have always folded under the pressure. Intels project to make hardware more platform agnostic was stopped by MS who saw a threat to their Wintel Symbios.

There is nothing stopping eg. device drivers from being implemented much lower down like in the actual hardware, talking only in pre standardized APIs. Whats stopping that great innovation that would put a stop to driver problems and make it much more easy to develop new products?

Guess once!

Replace it with MadWifi 802.11a/b/g from Atheros

I've simply removed from my laptop the Intel Pro Wireless 2100 WiFi Mini-PCI card and replaced it with a Atheros 802.11a/b/g chipset. The Multiband Atheros Driver for Wifi (aka MadWifi) is well supported under Linux [sourceforge.net]. It even has a great FAQ [clara.co.uk].
The card I bought is an IBM 11a/b/g Wireless LAN MiniPCI Adapter (IBM Part Number: 31P9701), and works flawlessly under REHL3.

And they're not afraid of reverse engineering?

If that's the real reason, how come they release them as binaries? Reverse engineering will reveal exactly the same information (eh, sorry, intellectual property) as inspecting the source code, although it takes a little bit more work. So, does anyone think Intel gave the real reason?

I have a Centrino notebook

I got a Dell Inspiron 8600 with Centrino technology and am typing on it now. It has a 1.4GHz Pentium-M processor. I got it for the battery life, I can do average (not idle) tasks for over 4 hours straight on the single 72 watt-hour battery (a second is available). I tried and successfully put a Knoppix CD in the drive and it booted up fine. It works but I probably can't get the same longer battery life. I'm pretty happy with this laptop, and squeezing another hour out of a battery on an operating system I don't primarily use isn't going to make me regret my decision.

Fiddling with device settings

I imagine that one reason that Intel doesn't want to release these details is because the driver has too much control over the device. If as much work as it seems is done by the processor, then that probably means you could force the chip to do some strange things. The most obvious ones that come to mind are a) increase power (although I can't really see why that would be a problem), b) sniff to your heart's content, and c) try a DOS attack on any nearby networks by saturating the airwaves with crap.

Intel doesn't want to risk being associated with these kinds of things (and you know if they released an open source driver, someone would).

This still doesn't however totally explain their not releasing a closed-source driver...

have we seen this before?

Have Intel invented the WinWiFi?

Didn't anybody learn from the WinPrinter and WinModem farces?

Why are they afraid? Just release non-GPL drivers

There is nothing that says that their drivers must be GPL'ed (at least to my knowledge). They can still release free drivers, and as long as they do not use GPL'ed software and follow the licensing rules to creating software for the linux kernel, they should need to release the source code to the drivers.

Seriously, doesn't Intel even understand the GPL? I mean, I may be mistaken, but as long as they do not use GPL'ed software in their code and release drivers for the different kernel versions, there shouldn't be a problem.

IP Issues?

When I emailed people at Intel over this matter, they eluded to the fact that releasing the source to a centrino wireless driver would violate FCC rules. Basically, the radiomodem in centrinos are totally programmable. That means, if you have the code, you can broadcast whatever you want on whatever frequency you want. You can violate FCC rules, and the FCC doesn't like that. Therefore, to be FCC certified, the user can not be able to change certain parts of the modem.

It sounds plausible, but they also could have been blowing smoke.

Re:IP Issues?

I've heard that before, and the upshot is, the FCC are idiots. Binary drivers are only slightly less hackable than open source ones. Hacked binary drivers that allow you to receive and broadcast on the forbidden frequencies already exist and were trivial to make.

Signed register sets is a much better solution which is both more secure and more open. Intel can design hardware that only accepts register sets that have been signed with Intel's private key. This would make it impossible (as opposed to just inconvenient) to use the forbidden frequencies, so the FCC would be happy. And it would be possible to write open-source drivers to load the signed register sets without compromising security or FCC certifiability.

A decent move...

If I achieve to make the NdisWrapper thing, Intel can be sure to receive a brand-new Linux WLAN-sent Fuck You mail.

Regards,
jdif

Any 2.6 Wifi out-of-box

Are there any decently cheap wifi cards supported by the 2.6 kernel (in the kernel source)?

software radio

It is possible that as with some Atheros-based WLAN cards (the D-Link DWI-G650 Bx for example), the radio in Intel's Centrinos is software-controlled. This means that its frequency and power can be changed to just about anything using software alone. Open-source drivers for something like this are out of the question -- the FCC would not be impressed.

Atheros' ended up releasing a binary-only driver... kernel-tainting and all. If the Centrino radio controllers are also software-based, you can expect a binary-only driver as well.

The answer is simple

Look, if they dont provide the drivers and there are no open source equivalents, its quite simple... choose a different product.

It's worse with the i855 video chipset

The situation is pretty infuriating with the video drivers for laptops with integrated graphics on 855GM chipset. Many of these come with a 1400x1050 SXGA+ lcd display but a bios that does not know how to switch to this mode. (No kidding, it can do 1024x768, 1280x1024, etc, but NOT the native lcd resolution...) Intel has not released specs to let the XF86 developers program the video modes from the driver, so X Windows is entirely dependent on the BIOS.

Result is your spiffy new SXGA+ laptop with Intel integrated graphics can only do a fuzzy interpolation at lower effective resolution. Needless to say, the Windows driver authors had all the info they needed to program the driver.

And you guess what trouble you will have getting the laptop to display on an attached external monitor....

Centrino still sucks.

No matter how you put it, what drivers are available, or how much hype Intel has put in it, the Centrino still sucks. The Wireless LAN card moreso than the Pentium M. I am perfectly happy with my Dell TrueMobile 1300 with 802.11b/g support. Takes about the same amount of power as the Centrino, but with g support to boot.

So What is the Real Excuse?

I've been dealing with this kind of stupidity ever since I tried to get an X server for my little 150Mhz IBM Thinkpad back in 1997.

The Thinkpad had an early NeoMagic video chipset. Neomagic wouldn't release the programming specs or a binary only driver. I was really pissed that the X people couldn't get the neccessary info to program the device. I even called Lou Gerstner's 'talk to the CEO' hotline. Gerstner's office called IBM Japan who called Neomagic who said "no". Since I'm an early adopter and IBM wasn't completely on the Linux bandwagon IBM didn't push back too hard.

To a large extent the only people you could get a driver from was X-Inside. That was $150 and cost a lot more than my entire OS. ($150 more to be exact). But I *really* wanted that and I paid the price.

As far as I can tell there are only a few explanations of this stupidity.

1. They are really afraid of the Chinese government assissted reverse engineers (or AMD's) copying their design overnight. Patents don't help much in China. If that's the case then what is the difference between a linux binary release and a winxp binary release? They could both be disassembled overnight by experienced engineers. In fact I was willing to do that work for the XFree86 group back in 1997 using SoftIce but they are a snooty bunch so I didn't bother.

Could it be that Win2K/2K3 and XP have mechanisms in them for slowing down reverse engineering. If that's true it may be the crucial difference. Many companies like Intel, AMD Etc know that the Chinese are going to copy their designs rapidly so they work with the accountants closely to compute the revenue stream from some piece of IP. If they can slow down the Chinese by even 3 to 5 months that may significantly increase their revenue.

I don't buy the excuse from Intel that they don't have the resources to do a linux release. That dog don't hunt. That have vast resources and they have used them to support Linux in the past.

2. They bought the FUD from MS about their drivers and thus their design being GPL'd because they interface to a GPL'd OS. Doubtful.

3. MS doesn't care as much if they help on the server side, but on the desktop/laptop they are probably under huge pressure from MS to inhibit Linux desktop adoption. Notice that they *have* released open source drivers to their etherpro100 network cards, but then those cards have the smarts inside, not in the software. Centrino's are a lot more like windmodems and we all know how long it took to get winmodem sources.

4. or Intel is being heavily squeezed in the market by AMD right now and the AVP's are really putting pressure on the departments to cut costs, move jobs to Bangalore etc. That means additional money spent developing drivers for Linux when linux hasn't exactly seen huge adoption on the desktop yet. I suspect this situation will change significantly this year (just started using Debian last month and *wow* -- good pick for UserLinux) and then Intel will be knocking down the doors to provide binary drivers. Intel may be persnickity about these kinds of things, but hardly anyone will turn aware money when it's on the table.

I'm not sure which of the above explanations make any sense. I think if there was more money to be made and less risk from angering MS they would have already done it.

Keep at it, it looks like the NDIS drivers are the short term solution.

This is ridiculous

If you want people to buy your HARDWARE to run their SOFTWARE you supply the appropriate DRIVER. And for high-end equipment Linux has more than enough market share at this point to justify Intel releasing a driver. At the very least, they should release the specs so the Linux crowd can develop one for them. This intellectual property buzz is likely nothing more than a sop to Microsoft, who wants to be first to support the latest, greatest processor and leave Linux out in the cold for a while.

Linuxant

I tried using the Linuxant driver, had problems, emailed their support, and I did not received a reply, not even an automated acknowledgement.

Based on their (lack of) responsiveness so far, I would not recommend them. I have switched to using the madwifi driver [sourceforge.net] (with a different wireless card).

hey

it's not like making closed source drivers for the linux kernel is hard, you basically make code that will use a static object file and call from it and include it, etc...
so, what's taking them so long?

Buy a 64-bit AMD notebook instead

Like this one [emachines.com]. Best Buy [bestbuy.com] sells them for $1299 after rebates. They're getting some mentions on the Fedora Test List [redhat.com]. It's amazing how much hardware you can get for semi-cheap when you're not paying the Centrino marketing tax. Besides, 32-bit CPUs are so last century.

Though you'll still need a NDIS wrapper to get the Broadcom 802.11g chip to work, or beat Broadcom with cluebats until they cough up the Linux driver they've apparently already written. Darn.

I'm going to stick with my desktop for now, but if I come up with an excuse to buy a notebook that's what I'll get.

Apple must just love these guys

So while Intel is sitting there, fretting about giving away secrets, Apple is producing one portable computer after another that will, reports say, give you a Wi-Fi Network with Yellow Dog Linux that runs just fine. In fact, if the 12" IBM ThinkPad X31 had real support for Wi-Fi under Linux, I might not have even considered the 12" iBook G4. As it stands ... sorry, IBM. Better luck in four or five years.

Maybe it is because I'm not a market droid, but what good is a product to a company when they are too afraid to sell it?

$20!

...prying $20 from your thin wallet to buy Linuxant's DriverLoader

Man, that's a pretty strange wallet if you can afford a centrino wireless device but you can't scrape up $20. Small businesses must have an impossible time trying to sell software on the Internet. Have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich one night instead of ROTK again. If I had centrino wireless (and I came really close having bought a T30 a few weeks before the T40s) I would be delighted to pay $20. It beats bying the Cisco mini-pci module which I believe is the only alternative for the T40.

Centrino laptops suck. I know, I have one.

I own the Sony Vaio Z1A. It is a rockin' machine in most respects: built-in wireless with hard "off" switch, nice keyboard and video, 6 hour (nominal) battery life with the standard battery, yadda yadda. Unfortunately it's a (spit) Centrino machine, which means:

• No sleep support (fu^H^Hthank you, Intel)
  
• No wireless support (FMH, Intel). Though the miniPCI slot is accessible, it's getting hard to find wireless miniPCI cards that are supported. I got mine from the Dell parts desk, pretending to own one of their late-2002 model laptops and ordering it as a replacement part.
  
• Poor throttling support. ACPI works moderately well on the hacked 2.6.0 kernel I'm running, so I can throttle the CPU -- but the main bus throttled modes don't work. This may be due to Intel weirdness or Linux weirdness, I don't know.
  

The upshot is that the battery life is effectively halved, and with no sleep capability that's a real pain. Swsusp is not ready for prime time, and anyhow it takes longer than it should.

I like the Vaio line, but given the opportunity for another purchase I would steer FAR away from Scumtrino.

Use a wrapper! NOT

No, sir, as long as you don't disclose the specs, and there is an open source driver, I am not going to a) take your Linux efforts seriously and b) buy any Centrino hardware. There's alternatives, forget?

Even obscure platforms have Centrino drivers

YellowTab's Zeta (the successor to BeOS) has Centrino drivers which just work. Sometimes, closed source can be beneficial...

Re:Thats why linux sucks...

Still, the fact is that Linux runs on almost anything you throw it at, only beasted by NetBSD. The trick is to buy supported hardware, which really isn't that hard.

Re:Yeah, that sucks

(typing this on a Centrino-based WinXP laptop)

Indeed.

However, when I decided to purchase a decent wireless card [buffalotech.com] , I would've liked to have been able to use it under Linux without paying extra. When you spend nearly UKP50 on the card, a discount on the Linuxant driver [linuxant.com] (at the very least!) would have been a nice gesture.

Re:Linux

And you base this on what?

Oh yeah? Well Microsoft sucks.

Oh wait, why am I not modded up? I guess your inclinations are incorrect.