I remember back in 2005 or so Intel was dicking around with ipw3945 shipping a userspace regulatory blob. Linux kernel devs didn't like this, I guess wouldn't m

I remember back in 2005 or so Intel was dicking around with ipw3945 shipping a userspace regulatory blob. Linux kernel devs didn't like this, I guess wouldn't merge the driver. Intel rewrote the driver into iwlwifi (iwl3945) which just loaded a microcode out of the firmware directory. However, the NDA compartmentalization issue would cause bugs. For instance, I guess the wifi microcode devs implemented hardware queuing but the intel kernel driver devs at the time didn't know this, so the driver devs just wrote their own queues in software and the users dealt with weird errors for some time because they literally couldn't ask the division that wrote the microcode how the hell it worked. I'm amazed anything with wifi works. For a time around then I just threw up my hands and used OpenBSD's reverse-engineered driver because it was more reliable and simple to understand.