[randomhacker123]

It is very likely that most Qualcomm customers like Starlink have access to the source code of the Qualcomm proprietary Wifi driver for the QCA wifi Access point SoCs. Some vendors also have access to the source code of the proprietary Wifi firmware running on the Tensilica CPUs inside the Wifi IP core of the SoC. (Linux runs on an ARM CPU in this SoC, the wifi IP cores are an extra realtime FW)

End consumers normally do not have access to some source code or any documentation about these chips, sometimes even the competitors are getting access to source code to integrate their solution better. I do not know whom they protect against, probably all people who did not sign a NDA.

These thinks are only shipped to end customers in binary only version to protect the IP from someone. Often it is pretty easy to tell the system it is now operating in a different country (e.g. setting in Web UI) and then it will not comply to the local radio regulatory requirements any more. From my experience it is not the FCC which really demands it, please blame the chip vendors for binary only driver first.

The worst hacker for a silicon vendor, where they normally protect most against, is some guy like the author of this blog post who analyses his device in much detail and tries to run own software on it which was not verified by the vendor first. Such software modifications could cause worse customer experience because it is performing worse (which is funny if they have to reboot the vendor software every 20 days) or could cause extra support effort.

[spmurrayzzz]

In my experience, its exceptionally rare to have vendors release code like that, if for no other reason than opsec concerns. Obviously larger clients have much more leverage, but even in those situations its usually because they're getting a bespoke branch of whatever mainline firmware is produced for their other retail products (assuming its not from-scratch for a client that size in the first place).

[baybal2]

> It is very likely that most Qualcomm customers like Starlink have access to the source code of the Qualcomm proprietary Wifi driver for the QCA wifi Access point SoCs

No. They are jus that hard to work with.

MTK, Qcom, BCom are all terrible with software support, no matter who you are.

[randomhacker123]

Candela Technologies for example has access to the QCA wifi firmware source code for the QCA Wifi 5 AP chips. They provide custom builds here: https://www.candelatech.com/ath10k.php I know of one other company. I do not know if they also have access to the driver source code, but I assume so.

Silicon vendors often do not care about small customers, small is probably less than 250k units per year. If you are a customer which is expected to generate more than 5% of the revenue for the complete product line or the business unit then you get good support from these companies.

The proprietary Broadcom Wifi driver was leaked multiple times by some companies which did not run the script to clean a GPL tar, but did something on their own and forgot to remove the Boardcom wifi driver source code. Last time I saw this was already 8 years ago. The Broadcom proprietary Wifi driver also contained the source code of the firmware running on the ARM chip inside the Wifi IP, at least it did this some time ago.

For the Qualcomm 5G modem and the graphics driver this is probably different.

[baybal2]

I am talking about world brands, 5m+ units a month

[mschuster91]

Unless you're Apple, I'd make an exception there - they absolutely require support from their vendors for all their non-standard stuff: AirPlay WiFi-based screen mirroring, Handoff, Thunderbolt-based Target Display Mode / Target Disk Mode.

Apple always demands to be in control of what is running on their devices, no matter what - even where it's pure software that's concerned, like with the NVidia fallout - and they (usually) insist on quality... there's a reason why Apple hardware feels so painless to interoperate, compared to the Windows or Linux world.

[mikevin]

I doubt Apple ever had real access to something like Intel ME though.