OpenWrt One / project update

[Ivan Ivanov]

> there are no Wifi-5+ chips on the market that can run without blobs

This is true, but at the same time - undoubtedly - some chips are more
likely to be liberated from blobs than the others. Some WiFi chip may
have been partially researched (i.e. someone tried to reverse-engineer
its binary blob) or at least a detailed-enough public PDF datasheet is
available so that its clear how the hardware operates, while some
other WiFi chip may lack these advantages and even use a firmware
signature that prevents the binary blob replacement by the opensource
alternative.

What I am afraid of, and what forces me to write e-mails like this
once-in-a-while - is a POSSIBILITY that OpenWrt One project has not
taken this "liberation-potential" into consideration while choosing a
chip for a new router - and as result, it may turn out after that
OpenWrt One project becomes popular and the people would like it to
become blobless (i.e. by some crowdfunding initiative), but then find
out it impossible to liberate because of some technical limitation
like that firmware signature.

> Could you please list the wifi chips you know of which ether have
> a) completely open source firmware, or
> b) no firmware at all (neither loaded in ram, nor in internal flash)?

The best WiFi hardware capable of working on 100% opensource, I am
aware of and using at the moment, is based on the chips of Atheros
ath9k / ath9k_htc families:
1) Netgear WNDR3800 router, SoC : Atheros AR7161 rev 2, yes it is
802.11n but it supports 5 GHz, and my ISP is slower than 300 Mbps in
any case
(bought it locally but you may visit this page for a more complete
description - shop [dot] vikings [dot]
net/product/wndr3800-wlan-router/ )
This router runs on LibreCMC (fork of OpenWRT to designate the routers
which could work on 100% opensource) and its U-Boot is blobless too
AFAIK
2) AR9462 MiniPCIe WiFi module, also 802.11n with 5 GHz support, for
G505S laptop with a coreboot opensource BIOS
(btw this G505S is the most powerful coreboot-supported laptop without
Intel ME/AMD PSP backdoors, has a quadcore AMD and up to 16/32GB RAM)
3)  There are also ath9k-based USB adapters which work on 100%
opensource, but those with 5 GHz support are rare (haven't been able
to find in the wild)

However, of course it does not mean that there is nothing newer than
this "ath9k" that could theoretically work on 100% opensource without
any blobs in userspace.
A couple of years ago I've seen someone trying to reverse-engineer a
newer chip's blob (think it was 802.11ac ), but a Google does not want
me to find this page atm :P

> And don't forget about the "bootROM", stored in silicon

BootROM is considered by Free Software Foundation as a part of
hardware, + it is not as bad as those bloated&buggy binary blobs
running at your OpenWRT space

On Thu, Apr 11, 2024 at 9:51 AM Piotr Dymacz <pepe2k at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> On 11.04.2024 10:52, Bjørn Mork wrote:
> > Ivan Ivanov <qmastery16 at gmail.com> writes:
> >
> >>> SOC: MediaTek MT7981B , Wi-Fi: MediaTek MT7976C
> >>
> >> Are these Mediateks capable of working without any binary blobs, at
> >> least in theory?
> >
> > A simple question back to you: Could you please list the wifi chips you
> > know of which ether have
> > a) completely open source firmware, or
> > b) no firmware at all (neither loaded in ram, nor in internal flash)?
>
> [...]
>
> And don't forget about the "bootROM", stored in silicon, taking care of
> (among other things) booting the SoC from different media.
>
> --
> Cheers,
> Piotr