proprietary firmware

Simon Matthews s.matthews at karrak.id.au
Fri Feb 8 15:37:15 CET 2008


Due to regulatory requirements over wireless frequencies, power and
modulation i can't see it being possible for the low level software that
controls the RF transmitters being Open Source.

Moving the software that modulates the transmitted RF and demodulates
the received RF onto the user space CPU just increases the burden on
that CPU, which might be acceptable for users who want to tinker with
this data, but for the majority of users just results in poorer
performance of the phone/computer as a whole.

Would it be possible to try to get the manufacturers of the chipsets to
install a standardised loader in flash or ROM on their devices that
would make it easy to download and flash a new binary image with data
encryption if need be. Would be great if this download was via a
standard hardware link like JTAG or some other simple
synchronous/asynchronous interface.

This would make it easy to fix bugs in the firmware, and would make it
easier to have different versions of the firmware that could allow more
or less processing be done on the user space CPU depending on the users
needs.

Regards
Simon

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