On Aug 12, 2015, at 4:42 PM, Larry Finger <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On 08/12/2015 02:15 PM, Richards, Sean wrote: >> No I am sorry it's not obvious. I was told to report the bug to you. I did >> so. I honestly don't know much about Linux. I like using it and reported >> the bug to help the community. I am sure I won't be the only one to >> purchase this device and Put RedHat / Fedora on it. > > Since you are new, I will offer a little tutorial. > > Firstly, it is better if you do not post your response before the quoted > material - called top posting. > > A. It puts the answer out of order and before the question. > Q. Why is top posting bad? > > The person that told you to report this problem to us did not know what they > were saying. This mailing list is for open-source drivers. As I said in the > first E-mail, and as I will explain a little more fully here, your device has > no open-source driver available. > > A third point is that when you will be posting the output from lspci, always > include the "-nn" switch in the command. That way the PCI IDs will be listed. > Those are the codes used by the system to recognize what driver the device > will use. There is always a possibility that the BCMXXXX designation may be > misleading. > > There are three sources of drivers for Broadcom wireless devices: > > 1. Driver b43 is open source and mostly covers older devices. It has been > written by the community based on clean-room reverse engineering. As stated > earlier, the more complicated the wireless technology, the more difficult the > reverse process. > > 2. Drivers brcmsmac and brcmfmac are open source and cover newer devices. > These drivers have been written by Broadcom employees, thus they have access > to the details of the internals of the wireless chips; however, not all new > devices are supported. > > 3. Driver wl, which is partly closed source, has been written by a different > set of Broadcom developers. It is a hybrid driver with two parts. The first > is open-source code that handles the interfacing between the wireless chip > control routines and the rest of Linux. The second part, which handles the > actual operation of the wireless chip, is only provided as a binary blob. The > probable reason for hiding this code is to preserve the "secrets" of the > chips. > > The list of what drivers are available for the various devices is available > at https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/b43. As shown there, > driver wl is the only option for your device. > > Larry
I was wondering if you could answer one more question for me. Would you mind expanding on this comment?? It will taint your kernel I am curious what you mean by that.-- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-wireless" in the body of a message to [email protected] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
