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Issue #1937

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Liberate the bcm4334 wifi/bluetooth firmware

Added by Kurtis Hanna almost 5 years ago. Updated about 3 years ago.

Status:
New
Priority:
Normal
Assignee:
-
Category:
Wi-Fi
Target version:
Start date:
06/13/2019
Due date:
% Done:

0%

Estimated time:
Resolution:
Device:
Grant:
Type of work:
Communication (mails, contacting people, etc)

Description

The driver for this chip seems to already be free software and is in the mainline linux kernel: https://redmine.replicant.us/issues/1836

Cypress now owns the rights to the bcm4334 chips' firmware. To my knowledge, Cypress is more likely to say yes to a request that they release the source code to this firmware with a free software license than Broadcom would have been. I don't believe anyone has formally asked Cypress to do this. Since this chip is in a lot of Replicant's supported devices, it would make sense for our project to formally ask this of them.

The non-free firmware binary seems to be available here:
https://github.com/OpenELEC/wlan-firmware/blob/master/firmware/brcm/brcmfmac4334-sdio.bin

There were some efforts to hack this chip's firmware in the past, but it seems to not have gone anywhere...

https://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=52499037&postcount=5
https://github.com/cociorbaandrei/bcmon
https://recon.cx/2013/video/Recon2013-Ruby%20feinstein%20Omri%20Ildis%20Yuval%20Ofir.mp4
https://recon.cx/2013/slides/Recon2013-Omri%20Ildis%2c%20Yuval%20Ofir%20and%20Ruby%20Feinstein-Wardriving%20from%20your%20pocket.pptx
https://bcmon.blogspot.com/
Some of this work seems to have been done by this developer, who we could maybe contact for help if we also want to hack the chip's firmware: https://github.com/shoote

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