You can currently only get away living without it if you are just
using iwl3945 or iwl4965 as they provide their own rate control
algorithms. In the future if other vendor drivers are added with their
own rate control algorithm this list grows.

FWIW, I would like to see those algorithms be supported as part of
mac80211 and not be internal like iwlwifi hacked them on, and have some
sort of feature negotiation between the hardware and the RC algorithm
when choosing one.

johannes