Linux Centrino Driver Update 273
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.
Comment removed (Score:1, Interesting)
And thus... (Score:5, Interesting)
Simple solution (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:And precompiled? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re: Intel's market down down down (Score:1, Interesting)
The other solution is:
To buy "AMD Athlon XP Mobile" or "AMD Duron Mobile" or "AMD Athlon64 Mobile" or magically "AMD Athlon32 SOI".
open4free
Shame on Intel (Score:2, Interesting)
buy "wireless ready" (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Secrets? (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Do it like M-Systems... (Score:3, Interesting)
Indeed. If you look at the Linux Atheros driver [sourceforge.net], Atheros and/or the people who licensed the proprietary bits from them provide a Hardware Access Layer (HAL) module that's binary-only. The rest of the driver can then just be GPL; the HAL takes care of hiding the precise details of talking to the card and doing all the FCC-compliance bits.
I bought the Intel card because I had the choice of Broadcom, which TMK has zero plans to release a Linux driver, and Intel, which has announced plans to. Both suck and will require ndiswrapper, but at least I can theoretically get native drivers for the Intel card in the future. [I just bought a Dell, after trying to get a laptop from other vendors for about 5 months; those were the options for the wifi card.]
I like your method, though. The problem with a HAL driver module is that it has to support your kernel; a .o file that gets wrapped into a module will be able to deal with different kernels better than having the binary bits be a whole module. niiiice.
Notebooks (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
It's like a bad date. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
And they're not afraid of reverse engineering? (Score:2, Interesting)
I have a Centrino notebook (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:ndiswrapper (Score:3, Interesting)
"Chipzilla and M$ have been "in bed" together for many years, and we all know how Microsoft feels about Linux."
I don't think Intel is in bed with Microsoft, at least not exclusively. I remember at one point Intel helped Be inc. (Creators of the now long-dead Be Operating System) to optimize their software for Intel processors. I also doubt Intel hates Linux, I bet they get lots of revenue from servers being converted to x86+Linux.
I think the delay in Linux Centrino drivers is mostly due to simple economics. Whether we like it or not, most people don't use Linux on their laptop. Writing Linux drivers is a secondary objective, because it would hardly get them any extra revenue.
3 Words: SDR -- Software Definable Radio (Score:2, Interesting)
Depending on the hardware, who knows maybe someone could even implement GSM/PCS on it. Whatever may be the case, having access to hardware like this would allow people to play around with it.
What is SDR? [compuserve.com]
GNU SDR implementation [gnu.org]
It's worse with the i855 video chipset (Score:1, Interesting)
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....
Re:Secrets? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
So What is the Real Excuse? (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Linuxant (Score:3, Interesting)
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).
Re:Secrets? (Score:2, Interesting)
Granted, these are the chipsets all by themselves, and not something a typical user could do anything with except fry with static.
And of course, my final products have to meet the specs in order to get FCC approval. But did you know that the firmware on the unit which the FCC tests doesn't have to be the same firmware shipped in production units! In fact, it's common practice to give the FCC testing labs special testing firmware. It doesn't even need to be fully functional. All it needs to do is the unit's "primary function." For instance, there are many handheld radio transmitters with keypads out there. Keypad scanning circuits tend to be really noisy, espcially on some microcontrollers. So you have special test firmware that starts transmitting when you press a key, and stops scanning the keyboard once you press that key. The FCC tester doesn't start measuring the emissions until the device it transmitting (it's "primary function"). Since the keypad has stopped scanning, it's no longer generating that noise and passes the test. Yes, the FCC tester is fully aware that they using "test-only" firmware!