[LEDE-DEV] FCC killing open platforms and inovations

[Petr Štetiar]

Simon Wunderlich <simon.wunderlich at open-mesh.com> [2016-11-17 10:49:01]:

Hi Simon,

> No, firmware (at least in ath10k) doesn't solve the problem. You can still set 
> a country code, DFS pattern matching is still done in the host-side driver 
> part (and not in the firmware), and you can still disable radar detection.

please correct me if I'm mistaken, but you should be able to get ath10k
firmware sources under NDA, at least Candela Technologies was able[1] to
obtain it. Then you can just prepare locked down version of the firmware for
US market, so you're not able to change country code, fiddle with DFS pattern
matching or disable radar detection from host-side driver.

I know, this is not robust solution either, someone can then swap the firmware
blobs and have unlocked version again. But you can do this with U-Boot also,
swap the locked down version with unlocked version if you really want to do
this.

To make it robust solution, WiFi chipsets would need to support uploading of
signed images only.

> In my personal opinion, binary blob firmware (at least as its used today) just 
> creates more problems regarding open-ness that it could possibly solve.

Well it's sad state of the things, but we're slowly getting used to have
binary blobs in GSM modems, WiFi chipsets and in GPUs for example. But for me
it's still far better to have one binary blob in the system(in WiFi for
example), then completely crippled and locked down devices like we're seeing
now with OpenMesh products.

1. http://www.candelatech.com/ath10k.php

-- ynezz