[SoaS] rt2x00 firmware

[Bernie Innocenti]

On Thu, 2010-01-07 at 14:22 +0100, Rubén Rodríguez Pérez wrote:
> I didn't know the XO required non-free drivers. Where can I find more
> details on this?

The driver is free, but it uses non-free firmware, which in the past has
been causing us all sort of trouble. Ironically, the Marvell chip is
codenamed "libertas":

  http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Libertas

Since Marvell refused to open the firmware, Deepak and Cozybit have been
working on a replacement firmware, called thinmac:

  http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Libertas_Thinfirmware_HOWTO


Besides the wifi firmware, most of the XO-1's power management is done
by the EC, an Intel 8051 co-processor:

  http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Ec_specification

Sadly, the EC firmware is proprietary. Quanta, the copyright holder,
refuses to release any information on it, let alone the source code.
There was an effort to rewrite a free version of it, but it looks like
it's been swamped:

  http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OpenEC
  http://dev.laptop.org/git/projects/openec

BTW, the Lemote Yeeloong notebook, which is supposed to be the most free
netbook on this planet, contains the same EC chip of the XO-1. It
probably runs yet another proprietary fork of the Quanta firmware.

The situation improved greatly over the last 10 years, but there's still
a lot of work still to be done by those who do care about freedom in
computing.

-- 
   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
 \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/