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Angus Ainslie

Embedded Kernel Developer

Latest posts by Angus Ainslie (see all)

• Shipping new SparkLAN Wifi cards with Librem 5 - February 9, 2023
• GPS Tuning the Librem 5 Hardware - September 15, 2020
• Solving the first FSF RYF hurdle for the Librem 5 - June 19, 2018

One of the unique features about the Librem 5 is its modular cellular modem and WiFi/Bluetooth cards. This not only aids in repairing hardware, it also means when new, compatible cards become available (or previous cards unavailable), we have the flexibility to change modules.

Up until December 2022 all Librem5 phones had been shipping with the Redpine RS9116 M.2 module. New Librem 5 Phones are now shipping with the SparkLAN WNFB-266AXI(BT).

There were a few reasons for changing WiFi cards, but one of the primary ones was the lack of mainline driver support. Maintaining an out of tree vendor driver is a difficult task for a small team.

The brcmfmac driver wasn’t in perfect condition when we started shipping the cards. The two main issues we had were:

1. The card would not come back after the hardware kill switch was toggled.
2. Hotspot mode was not working.

By default the brcmfmac driver disabled the REMOVABLE property of the SparkLAN card so this patch fixed issue #1.

The hotspot was fixed by Sebastian with this patch to NetworkManager

Firmware Jail

Moving to the SparkLAN card presented another other challenge because the driver loads firmware when the module loads and we can’t ship firmware with PureOS. We decided to create a firmware jail to put the firmware in.

The firmware jail is a region in NOR flash that is read only from the kernel. We flash the jail during phone production and it gets loaded into /lib/firmware/ by the initramfs. This way, the firmware shows up in the rootfs, while allowing PureOS to stay pure.

Should users want to use a newer firmware any files copied into /lib/firmware will override what is in the firmware jail.

Comparison SparkLAN vs Redpine

¹ Since being acquired by Silabs it looks like the driver might be maintained again.
² Card uses 0.65 W while suspended
³ With recent NetworkManager
⁴ Redpine documentation claims it works but empirical testing indicates otherwise.

Upgrade Your Librem 5 WiFi

Another advantage to the modular WiFi card is that existing Librem 5 customers who have the original Redpine card have the option to upgrade. We are now offering the SparkLAN card for sale in our shop in case you want to upgrade the Redpine module in your Librem 5.

Purism Products and Availability Chart

	Model	Status	Lead Time
	Librem Key (Made in USA)	In Stock ($59+)	10 business days	Learn More Buy Now
	Librem 5	In Stock ($999+) 3GB/32GB	10 business days	Learn More Buy Now
	Librem 5 + SIMple (4 GB Data)	In Stock ($99/mo)	10 business days	Learn More Buy Now
	Librem 5 + SIMple Plus (10 GB Data)	In Stock ($129/mo)	10 business days	Learn More Buy Now
	Librem 5 + AweSIM (Unlimited Data)	In Stock ($169/mo)	10 business days	Learn More Buy Now
	Librem 11	In Stock ($999+) 8GB/1TB	10 business days	Learn More Buy Now
	Librem 14	In Stock ($1,370+)	10 business days	Learn More Buy Now
	Librem Mini	Apr 2024 ($799+)	Shipping April, 2024	Learn More Buy Now
	Liberty Phone (Made in USA Electronics)	Apr 2024 ($1,999+) 4GB/128GB	Shipping April, 2024	Learn More Buy Now
	Librem Server	Apr 2024 ($2,999+)	Shipping April, 2024	Learn More Buy Now