Re: mSATA card?

On Tue, 23 May 2023, Michal Sapka wrote:

Hi,

> I am currently using AX200 card. As we all know FreeBSD is yet to properly support it. I want to buy some temporary Wi-Fi card to use, but the selection process is very problematic.
>
> If I understand correctly, my laptop (Thinkpad X1 Extreme) is compatible with mSATA cards but most of the ones I found are not whitelisted in the bios by Lenovo. Moreover, I'd love the drivers not to be a blob (like for Intel) but open. This is also something I don't truly understand, so correct me if I'm wrong but if the driver is in /sys/dev of FreeBSD then it means the full driver is there, right?

mSATA or mPCIe?   Likely the latter?

No if a driver is in sys/dev or sys/contrib/dev it doesn't mean it's all
open source.  A lot of modern NICs (wired or wireless) will have
firmware (blobs) along in order to function.  So while the driver (OS
side) is open source, what runs on the chip (the tiny computer on the
cards) usually is not (anymore).


-- 
Bjoern A. Zeeb                                                     r15:7