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Remembering Larry Finger, who made Linux wireless work

arstechnica.com

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Re: Remembering Larry Finger, who made Linux wireless work

#11

Post by freedomben »

Wow, this is sad news indeed for the world at large, but also me personally. I'm suddenly in deep regret for having procrastinated reaching out the thank him. He doesn't know this, but he was somewhat of a mentor for me.

In the early 00s I bought a laptop that had an RTL 8188 CE card in it that ran awful under Linux. I forked his driver and made a number of changes to it and eventually got my wifi working really well (by doing things that could never be upstreamed due to legal/regulatory restrictions). Over the years I rebased often and reviewed the changes, and learned a lot from watching his code. It took a bit of getting used to, but a certain amount of beauty and appreciation emerged. One thing was very clear: This man was doing a lot of the work to keep the ship together. Even just keeping the driver compilable with each kernel release often took some non-trivial refactoring, which he did reliably and well.

Larry, you will be missed my friend. RIP.

If you are waiting to reach out to somebody, don't wait too long or it may suddenly be too late. The years can slip by in a flash.

Re: Remembering Larry Finger, who made Linux wireless work

#12

Post by camkego »

nashashmi wrote: post #7

I always think of him every week or so for his support of a belkin wireless card FG… I had as a broke college student in 2005 trying to get linux working on my machine. His driver worked better than the belkin supported windows driver. What do I think about? Why the hell did he volunteer his post work hours trying to do this menial job hardware thing. Did he not have a family or something? He did. And today they lost…

It seems he was the best in the world at broad Linux Wi-Fi driver development. That’s quite a valuable accomplishment. Thanks, Larry Finger.

Re: Remembering Larry Finger, who made Linux wireless work

#14

Post by freedomben »

nashashmi wrote: post #7

I always think of him every week or so for his support of a belkin wireless card FG… I had as a broke college student in 2005 trying to get linux working on my machine. His driver worked better than the belkin supported windows driver. What do I think about? Why the hell did he volunteer his post work hours trying to do this menial job hardware thing. Did he not have a family or something? He did. And today they lost…

Same, if not for Larry I may not still be a Linux user. Unsung hero indeed.

Re: Remembering Larry Finger, who made Linux wireless work

#16

Post by dang »

neogodless wrote: post #8

See also: https://lwn.net/Articles/979419/ https://www.phoronix.com/news/Larry-Finger-Linux-Wireless https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/06/larry-finger-linux-w...

Thanks - I've changed the URL to the last one of those (from https://www.developer-tech.com/news/2024/jun/24/linux-commun...) because it seems to have the most background.

Re: Remembering Larry Finger, who made Linux wireless work

#17

Post by dang »

kapilvt wrote: post #5

Arstechnica has a solid write up. He did a lot of work making linux wifi and driver ecosystem significantly better. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/06/larry-finger-linux-w... I remember cursing ndis wrappers and Broadcom wifi ecosystem a long time ago, Larry helped fixed that, and mentored many others along the way. quote from the arstechnica article "In a 2023 Quora response to someone asking if someone without…

(This was originally from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40770724 but we merged those comments hither)

Re: Remembering Larry Finger, who made Linux wireless work

#20

Post by freedomben »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #18

[flagged]

Wrong and terrible timing. There's a hell of a lot more to "Linux WiFi" than just the driver code that Larry maintained. I definitely wouldn't rule out hardware issues. I've seen race conditions in driver code before, but it's quite rare and Larry was really good at identifying and elimianting those. If your laptop is workable, pop the cover and make sure the wifi card connection is fully seated. Also check the dmesg logs early and often after boot and make note of anything related to wifi. Chances are good that if it's not a hardware issue, there's something in there to help point you in the right direction.
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