On Tue, Apr 14, 2020 at 11:37:24AM +0100, Kevin Chadwick wrote:
> On 2020-04-14 09:21, Stefan Sperling wrote:
> > Regarding other chipsets, if you want the fastest possible AP on OpenBSD
> > your best option right now is to get a bwfm(4) device, which offloads almost
> > all of its 802.11 operation into a firmware blob running in the embedded
> > system on the device.
> 
> Interesting.
> 
> BWFM(4)
> CAVEATS
>      The firmware is outdated and contains known vulnerabilities.
> 
> Any more information on the seriousness of these vulnerabilities?
> 
> I can probably look it up in CVS actually but figured it *may* be prudent of 
> me
> to highlight that caveat on the list explicitly, in any case.
 
I honestly don't know and don't really care. Even if we knew what publicly
known or unknown bugs linger in there, we couldn't do anything about it.
All we can really do is upgrade the firmware and hope for the best.

The same is true for the Intel wifi chips.

What's nice about athn(4) is that the full software stack from driver to
hardware is open source, including firmware for USB devices. So it's
possible to fix issues, though it can be quite hard to fix known bugs.
No firmware abstraction means the driver needs to deal with a lot of
complexity all by itself, i.e. problems that engineers at vendors with
proper testing equipment and low-level expertise tend to deal with.

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