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Date: Sun, 28 Sep 2014 14:50:02 -0600 (MDT)
From: Warren Block <wblock@wonkity.com>
To: Gavin Atkinson <gavin@FreeBSD.org>
Subject: Re: WiFi 802.11/ac PCIe supported adaptor
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Cc: FreeBSD Current <freebsd-current@freebsd.org>,
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On Sun, 28 Sep 2014, Gavin Atkinson wrote:
> On Sun, 28 Sep 2014, O. Hartmann wrote:
>> Networking wasn't an issue for me for years, but now, sitting on a pile of neat new
>> hardware of which FreeBSD can not make any serious use, let me rethink. Luckily, The
>> Lenovo laptops have a mini PCIe WiFi NIC - if I'm willing to follow FreeBSDs agony I'm
>> able to swap the NIC with a piece of hardware that is supported. But it is additional
>
> Unfortunately, many Lenovo laptops lock the BIOS down in such a way that
> they won't boot without the NIC they were shipped with :(

Well, or a short list of approved Lenovo-branded cards.  In the past, 
Lenovo (or IBM) has supplied Atheros cards.  The trick will be finding 
that list and identifying the chipsets on each.  There are also 
unofficial BIOS modifications to remove the limits.

>> it is also due to a bad politics. nVidia, for instance, offers a BLOB for their GPUs.
>> Yeah! But no OpenCL support. AMD offers nothing but promises and their efforts regarding
>> opensource drivers is a pity.

AMD has actually supported the open Radeon driver, both with programming 
information and (I think) employing developers to work on it.