[acd]

Can someone please do a crowdfunding for a fully open source 802.11ac chipset and mini PCI express device?

For security purposes we do not want any binary drivers, blobs, bloated boat loaders and other fancy non-security in the hardware. This is really really basic security level.

[zamadatix]

802.11-2016 is a 3000+ page (very dense) technical standard, you'd need bigger backing than a crowdfunding campaign to create an open hardware+open software solution for it.

[apenwarr]

Some of the openwrt people believe they can write an open source replacement firmware for the ath10k-based devices. Someone should fund them.

Writing new firmware would be a lot easier than designing a new chipset.

[mrsteveman1]

> Can someone please do a crowdfunding for a fully open source 802.11ac chipset and mini PCI express device?

A few RF transceivers and an FPGA like an Artix-7 (which has PCIe capability) might do the trick. It wouldn't be as cheap as a mass produced chipset, but a completely open 802.11ac chipset is unlikely to be mass produced anyway.

We already have examples of LTE base stations being run with SDR hardware like the LimeSDR, which is just an RF transceiver and an Altera FPGA, with a USB3 connection to the FPGA fabric.

In fact there are some SDR/FPGA dev kits that are Mini PCIe size and intended for use inside a laptop, specifically designed with LTE in mind[1].

So WiFi seems doable, even if you end up with a soft core CPU in the FPGA to do the same jobs WiFi chipset firmware is doing right now, at least you'd have full control over it and the firmware running on it.

[1] https://www.crowdsupply.com/fairwaves/xtrx

[throwaway2048]

unfortunately the FPGA ecosystem is even more closed and open source unfriendly than the wifi hardware one, you aren't allowed to know anything about the chips, how code runs, or how to upload your own code, and you even have to use vendor specific IDEs and language extensions you are lucky if work anywhere outside of windows.

Current market FPGAs definitely aren't some shining beacon alternative to shitty hardware vendors, they are amongst the worst of the lot.

[mrsteveman1]

A few years ago that was true, and commercial tools are still horrid and closed and necessary for certain FPGA families.

But as of right now you can use[1] the Lattice iCE40 (small, 8k LUTs), Lattice UltraPlus (5k LUTs, DSPs) and Lattice ECP5[2] (~85k LUTs, with 5G SerDes and PCIe Gen 2) with completely open tools. The ECP5 in particular would be well suited for it.

And there is a productive effort[3] to do the same for the Artix-7 and other Xilinx 7 Series parts.

Even for those parts that are still very much closed, you can load an existing bitstream on them using open tools. Intel Max10, which is the part found on the LimeSDR Mini, is one of those even though we don't have open bitstream documentation for it yet.

The major commercial FPGA tools all work Linux at this point too, I use most of them on Ubuntu routinely including Lattice Diamond, Altera/Intel Quartus, and Xilinx ISE/Vivado.

[1] http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/

[2] https://github.com/SymbiFlow/prjtrellis

[3] https://github.com/SymbiFlow/prjxray

[pjc50]

This is a lot harder to achieve than it sounds. Open source hardware projects that go as far as chip design - are there any of these that have been successful?

It needs a lot of money. You'd have to sell people a free virtual spaceship with the thousand-dollar tiers, maybe. And persuade people to accept higher per-unit costs than the cheap Chinese equivalents.

[bri3d]

There are a lot of open-source SDR projects around for things like LTE - you'll never get the per-unit costs of fixed function taped-out designs but it should be doable. SDR stacks already exist for WiFi monitoring and analysis although most of the stacks are CPU based and therefore too slow to associate with networks because they can't send ACKs in time. With an FPGA based system the latency requirements are probably achievable.

The better approach is probably a fully open firmware for an existing ASIC - let someone else subsidize your production costs. Obviously there's still attack surface in the fixed-function ASIC components but the attack surface is way smaller and the boundary could probably be audited fairly well.

[rdl]

Better leverage would probably be demand side -- get a couple of major buyers (maybe for systems which can safely use older tech, like industrial or government or finance) to demand a baseline which requires open source/verifiable hardware, at least for certain systems.

[nerdbaggy]

It’s hard. Cisco doesn’t even make their own WiFi chips. The cost to benefit ratio isn’t worth it.

[vokep]

PLEASE YES THIS.

Honestly it feels like a fantasy though