When to expect support for 3945 Wireless in Rawhide

[Gianluca Sforna]

On 3/13/07, Paul Michael Reilly <pmr at pajato.com> wrote:
> I am simply taking the viewpoint that using a device in a modern OS
> should be a seamless operation from the User perspective, assuming for
> Fedora that the device has freely available firmware (when relevant) and
> drivers.

Until recently, the freely available drivers were not in the "free"
shape needed for inclusion in Fedora, since they relied on a binary
only daemon for working.


> In this case my understanding is that Fedora is choosing to
> support the 3945 wireless chip via direct kernel support rather than via
> an ipw3945 (or some such) rpm package.

That apply to basically every kernel driver, so ipw3945 is by no means
special. kmod rpms are discouraged as the natural place for kernel
drivers is IN the kernel sources.

> And since the kernel appears to
> look for the firmware in a particular location (it complains when it
> cannot find it) the natural question, "how should the firmware file get
> put in place?" occurred.  And it seems to me that the answer should be
> that the firmware was put in place by the distro, as part of an install
> process.  So I am trying to understand how Fedora 7 is going to resolve
> this issue and I asked you hoping you would know.

I believe it will do that in the exactly same way as everything else:
installing an RPM with the firmware files. There are already a lot
under review for various wifi chipsets (including ipw3945) so they
will be probably show up (soon?) in the main repository.

To speed up the process, you may wish to help with the reviews