[SoaS] rt2x00 firmware

[Walter Bender]

2010/1/7 Bernie Innocenti <bernie at codewiz.org>:
> 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.
>

For what it is worth, it would be a fair estimate to say that over 50%
of the headaches we had in relationship to getting the OLPC XO-1 up
and running were related to bugs and bad programming practices in the
proprietary EC code. A sad situation and extremely inefficient. That
said, I think Quanta actually licenses the EC software from a 3rd
party. They cannot make it free themselves :(

-walter
> --
>   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
>  \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/
>
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-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org