staging/wlan-ng firmware blob

[Karl Relton]

On Mon, 2009-06-29 at 16:15 -0700, Luis R. Rodriguez wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 11:49 AM, Karl
> Relton<karllinuxtest.relton at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> > Dear friends
> >
> > With the advent of 2.6.31 into Karmic, please be advised that the
> > staging/wlan-ng driver (module prism2_usb.ko) used for prism2_usb cards
> > can now load the card firmware blob direct from /lib/firmware using the
> > normal kernel firmware mechanism (previously it required a special
> > userspace program to squirt the firmware at it).
> >
> > The driver will load prism2_ru.hex if present in /lib/firmware.
> >
> > Therefore can we upgrade the Ubuntu linux-firmware package to include
> > this file?
> 
> Patches to the linux-firmware should be sent to David Woodhouse. Since
> this is upstream drivers/staging it should be welcomed.
> 

Yes indeed. I have emailed David a couple of times over the past few
weeks, but haven't had any response at all. I wondered if there was a
policy against firmware for old wireless cards.

> The next question is the license of the firmware. Who is giving you
> rights to redistribute it and so on? Its preferred that the authors of
> the firmware from the company involved send the patch themselves but
> not required.
> 

I had already made some enquires to the maintainers of the linux-wlan-ng
project who include the firmware in their tarball (which forms the
source of the Ubuntu linux-wlan-ng* packages). They checked their
paper-trail as much as they could - the trail is complicated because the
originating company has changed hands so many times. As far as they
could tell the last owners were Conexant who freely distributed this
firmware. I put words to this effect in the WHENCE file to David
Woodhouse, with a signed-off-by from the guy at linux-wlan-ng project.

> > The file can be obtained from the source of linux-wlan-ng-firmware - the
> > file required is ru010803.hex, and it should be renamed to prism2_ru.hex
> > for installation in /lib/firmware.
> 
> Under what license?
> 

Please see README.firmware in the linux-wlan-ng-firmware source tarball.

> > Note - doing this will render the linux-wlan-ng-firmware package
> > redundant for prism2_usb cards (though the package does have other
> > firmware blobs for non-usb cards).
> 
> Those packages should die then.
> 
>   Luis
>