State of bluetooth & wifi drivers in linux-libre

[Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli]

On Sun, 20 Oct 2024 17:16:39 +0000
Divya <divya at subvertising.org> wrote:
> Quite a sad fact indeed. On the other hand, I wanted to ask what is
> the state of bluetooth/wifi adapters in linux-libre are most/all open
> firmware adapters supported by the kernel?
Ath9k compatible cards are still the best supported WiFi cards, some
support both 2.4GHz and 5GHz but they are WiFi N only. They are
available in PCI, PCIe (some with M2 interfaces as well), pc-card, and
also in some WiFi access point.

For WiFi USB cards, the best supported are compatible with the
ath9k_htc firmware and driver, but they are limited to 2.4 GHz only.
They also consume more power than the PCIe ones.

The biggest issue is that there is no chip that can be used on
smartphones or tablets due to too big power consumption and the
difficulty of providing PCIe on such devices.

So the way forward is to free the firmware I mentioned in my other mail
by reconstructing its missing source code.

Then for bluetooth I'm unsure if there are free firmwares that can be
used to provide bluetooth (some are available but they are meant for
security research), but some bluetooth USB keys are compatible with the
btusb linux-libre driver. 

The issue is that these keys typically have builtin firmwares (which
can sometimes even act as a keyboard/mouse to support remote
keyboards/mouse during boot).

Since WiFi looks way more crucial than Bluetooth it might be a good
idea to concentrate on that first.

Denis.
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