[Assist] wireless drivers

[Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli]

On Mon, 29 Dec 2014 02:34:26 -0600
Isaac David Reyes González <isacdaavid at gmail.com> wrote:
> as far as my knowledge goes, if the driver is non-free then it
> shouldn't even exist in Linux-libre. If the chip requires the kernel
> to load nonfree firmware on it then the whole card is useless under
> Linux-libre, even if the driver is free.
How would you know that it requires a non-free firmware?
I'm not aware of any proprietary drivers inside the official linux
kernel.

However some of theses free drivers requires a non-free firmware to
make the hardware work. And yes, parabola and linux-libre doesn't
remove theses drivers and ship them.

How would you know without making mistakes, which driver work and which
doesn't work without a non-free firmware.

That might sound easy at first, a lot of people know that the intel
wireless drivers don't work without the firmware.

But where do you actually draw the line when many devices do work, out
of the box, with linux-libre, without loading the non-free
firmware(and the official linux kernel tries to load the firmware).

Many ethernet network cards drivers complains about the lack of free
firmware, yet they seem to works flawlessly.

How about the radeon GPU? some do work, some don't.

The bottom line is that in many cases we need to test on real hardware
to really know.

Denis.
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