Re: understanding the role/relationship of the firmware and driver in case of Wi-Fi adapters
Martin T <m4rtntns@gmail.com> wrote:
> 1) Are there Wi-Fi adapters which do not need firmware? I guess there
> are if manufacturer does not use semi-general purpose hardware?
I guess: not anymore. The last ones I saw without firmware were in the
11MBit era of wifi.
All the new ons with 54Mbit and up are actually so-called "software
defined radios" which are not more than a multi-purpose HF chip plus a
controller which can be used to programm (nearly) any functionality into
the hardware.
I remember some of the Atheros-based cards were/are very sought after by
amateur radio operators and hackers (in the white hat meaning of the
word) because you can reprogramm them to be _any_ type of radio in the
frequency range from 800MHz to 6000MHz.
> 2) Is the RAM built into the Wi-Fi card chipset? If I inspect my
> Ralink W-Fi card, which loads the 4096 byte /lib/firmware/rt2870.bin
> firmware file once the interface is brought up, then I don't see a
> separate RAM chip:
> https://www.dropbox.com/s/9z5rir3byfr9sg2/TEW-624UB-front.png
> https://www.dropbox.com/s/8p4iw8dpnfiphqb/TEW-624UB-back.png
> So in this case the RAM which stores the rt2870.bin firmware file is
> probably part of the RT2870F chip?
It would seem that way, yes.
Grüße,
Sven.
--
Sigmentation fault. Core dumped.
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