Any good reason for choosing Broadcom chip as Pinephone Pro's WiFi ?

[mikeb]

IMHO, Broadcom is one of the worst companies when it comes to open-source (although perhaps slightly better than NVidia).

The regular Pinephone has a Realtek WiFi. Of course, this Realtek is worse than a freedom-respecting Atheros ath9k AR9462 found at Librem5,
but at least there's an ongoing research for the opensource replacement of Realtek blob which I've seen somewhere, giving some hope for a future liberation.

Meanwhile, there's no such research for Broadcom - because, the first thing any smart (capable-of-reverse-engineering) Linux-loving person does when he accidentally gets a laptop with a Broadcom WiFi preinstalled, is to throw it away and replace it with a card based on a better chip - either an old trusty blobless Atheros, or from another company the binary blob of which doesn't suck as much. But unfortunately you couldn't do this with Pinephone Pro since it's soldered...

The only reason why I'm not considering a Pinephone Pro - is because I would like to avoid Broadcom.
I hope this could be changed for the future generations of Pinephone. Wonder if MiniPCIe card could be fit

[biketool]

Like the Allwinner processor so also the Broadcom WiFi is probably cheaper.
While I don't mind a brick phone I think that is why they don't have socketed hardware to reduce thickness.
The Liberm 5 spec's look good looks good(not sure about all component makers) but at $1300 it is too expensive for me.

[Subsentient]

For what it's worth, after installing the right firmware, I find the PinePhone Pro's wifi driver to be much more *reliable* than the PinePhone's. I'm not a fan of blobs, but the most important thing to me is that the *operating system* is true FOSS, and nothing too sinister in the firmware.

If I had to guess, I would say they probably picked a Broadcom chip because despite its needs for blobs, once you actually add the blob it wants, it actually works. Not defending Broadcom, but I had a lot, and I mean, a lot, of issues with the 8723cs chip in the original PinePhone. Simply pulling too much data over wifi was enough to hang the kernel. Something about disabling cores for powersaving would totally destroy the reliability of the driver, and it wasn't always necessary to do that to get it to hang the phone solid. To my knowledge, the original PinePhone's wifi drivers are still a diarrhea smoothie.

[linmob]

The regular Pinephone has a Realtek WiFi. Of course, this Realtek is worse than a freedom-respecting Atheros ath9k AR9462 found at Librem5, but at least there's an ongoing research for the opensource replacement of Realtek blob which I've seen somewhere, giving some hope for a future liberation.

The Librem 5 ships with a Redpine Signals RS9116 chip, which uses a lot of power and gets quite hot occasionally. It also requires some (I‘d assume proprietary) firmware, too: https://source.puri.sm/angus.ainslie/fir...new-readme
The state of fully free WiFi chips that can be connected in embedded devices (meaning not via PCIe or USB, but via technologies like SDIO) is sadly very disheartening - afaik there is actually no option (which is why PINE64 started that Nutcracker challenge).

Regarding the PinePhone Pro: To me, Realtek and Broadcom are both bad and possible security risks, but not enough so that I go the inconvenient route and don’t use them.. For most people, the chip in the PinePhone Pro is an improvement though, since it works better. If you really dislike this, you can always go ahead and flip that kill-switch and then use a USB device you feel comfortable with, e.g., an Atheros AR9271 or AR7010 USB dongle, like the replicant people advise for their Libre Android devices.

[mikeb]

The Librem 5 ships with a Redpine Signals RS9116 chip, which uses a lot of power and gets quite hot occasionally. It also requires some (I‘d assume proprietary) firmware, too: https://source.puri.sm/angus.ainslie/fir...new-readme

Yes, seems that Purism is now using RS9116 instead of AR9462 at their new revisions of Librem 5    Although RS9116 has the better tech specs, that's less software freedom because of the closed source proprietary firmware. That's the first time I hear about this Redpine Signals company, because of their small marketshare it's less likely that someone would reverse-engineer their firmware - but on the other hand it may be possible to petition them to release the sources.

The state of fully free WiFi chips that can be connected in embedded devices (meaning not via PCIe or USB, but via technologies like SDIO) is sadly very disheartening - afaik there is actually no option (which is why PINE64 started that Nutcracker challenge).

Regarding the lack of SDIO freedom-respecting adapters: do you think it may be possible to use a USB one (i.e. ath9k_htc) via some USB-to-SDIO converter?

[linmob]

The state of fully free WiFi chips that can be connected in embedded devices (meaning not via PCIe or USB, but via technologies like SDIO) is sadly very disheartening - afaik there is actually no option (which is why PINE64 started that Nutcracker challenge).

Regarding the lack of SDIO freedom-respecting adapters: do you think it may be possible to use a USB one (i.e. ath9k_htc) via some USB-to-SDIO converter?

While I was surprised to find out that such converters exist: It just make the hardware design a lot more complicated (more chips, more space) and thus expensive, and you would invest in chips that are over ten years old and (I did not manage confirm this by wild duckduckgoing) likely End-Of-Life, and thus in short or at least uncertain supply. The idea of the Nutcracker challenge to get newer, fully libre chips is a more promising route to take.