Tertiary firmware and correct RIDs

Pavel Roskin proski at gnu.org
Wed Nov 13 15:47:10 EST 2002


Hello!

> what are the advantages using the tertiary firmare ?

Tertiary firmware does some operations (802.11 management functions)  
automatically in the firmware, while in the HostAP mode those operations
have to be done by the driver.

The current HostAP code is so good, that I really cannot talk about
advantages of tertiary firmware unless you are very limited with the
processing power or memory of your host machine.

The disadvantage is that the Intersil tertiary firmware is proprietary, so
you cannot fix it if it does the wrong thing, unlike HostAP.  In fact, you
cannot even distribute the tertiary firmware legally.

I'm trying to add tertiary firmware support to replace a proprietary OS
with Linux on systems with wireless cards already using tertiary firmware.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin




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