Any wifi drivers made it into kernel? Best GPL'd wifi driver?

[DJA]

Juan M. Duran wrote:
> On mar, 2006-01-24 at 13:10 -0800, seberino at spawar.navy.mil wrote:
> 
>>Are there any GPL'd 100% open source wifi drivers
>>in Linux kernel such that it is NOT necessary
>>to recompile your wifi modules at every kernel upgrade?
> 
> 
> 
> I'm currently using rt2500.ko module, for ralink chips.  The rt2400 (for
> the "b" adapter) and rt2500 (for the "g") now come with mostly all
> distributions.  The 2500 chip is not precisely the best but is cheap and
> works in monitor mode. I have a pair of PCMCIA cards with it and no
> problem.
> 
> And the module is GPL'd, indeed.

And from what I have seen, that's about it for pure open source WiFi 
drivers. The problem, as I understand it, is that because of FCC 
regulations regarding power and such, card manufacturers do not want the 
liability of someone modifying one of their cards such that it violates 
any FCC regulations. As a result, Linux WiFi support is pretty much 
considered a mess - about where USB support was two years ago, at best.

Aside from the RaLink-based cards, your next best bet is Intel IPW2200BG 
which is well supported and nearly 100% functional in all regards, 
including now being supported as a Host AP. Intel supplies the firmware, 
which is tightly supported by open source drivers.

Driver: http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/
Firmware: http://support.intel.com/support/notebook/sb/CS-006408.htm
WPA/WPA2 support: http://hostap.epitest.fi/wpa_supplicant/

As I've mentioned before, I have this card in my laptop and it works fine.

Note that there is steady and ongoing development on WiFi support on 
Linux, including this chipset, so it is not unusual to have to update 
the driver and/or firmware with a kernel upgrade.

-- 
    Best Regards,
       ~DJA.