On Fri, 2007-02-09 at 15:24 +0100, Holger Schurig wrote: > > > I think the biggest problem here is the firmware. The OLPC > > > people have a special firmware for their USB dongle, which > > > is not used in other chips, so a driver that has been > > > heavily adapted to this firmware isn't easy to mangle to a > > > different firmware. > > > > No, it really hasn't. The mesh-specific bits are a separate > > code path, and we routinely run non-mesh firmware using this > > driver. If there are places that are missing run-time > > firmware version checks, then we need to fix those places. > > In the libertas mailing list someone published the "WLAN Firmware > Spec v5.1" spec, so I guess that you're now using this firmware. Right; I think that was an inadvertent error on Ronak's part; but the document is out there now and there's no way it can be taken back. > But the Windows driver that I got hold on (to extract the > firmware) all had a 5.0 in their driver name, so I guess they > have a v5.0 firmware. The WLAN Firmware document has a changelog at the end, so that might give you the ability to figure out what pieces had been added to the v5.1 firmware. > But I guess this can be handled with if (fw_version >= > FW_VERSION_5_1) or something like this. Exactly. The v5.1 firmware is available on Marvell's site here; perhaps it would work for you? There's nothing really OLPC specific in this particular firmware version AFAIK. But it might be USB-only, I'm not sure. It would also be interesting figure out what the Boot2 firmware version for your variant is. http://marvell.com/drivers/driverDisplay.do?dId=160&pId=38 > > Again, why don't we work together? We are _not_ intentionally > > screwing over anybody else, and if there are pieces that you > > need, why don't we put those pieces back in? > > Based on the things you said, I see no reason NOT to work > together. Ok, great. > > > We are _not_ intentionally screwing over anybody else, and if > > there are pieces that you need, why don't we put those pieces > > back in? > > I did not say this. I just saw in GIT that you remove misc things > or discussed the removed of things (e.g. CIS related code), so I > guessed that you only go into the USB dongle direction. But > maybe you weren't aware that other WLAN devices with similar > chips, but different host interface are available. Right; we knew of the existence of the 8385 chip, but not much seemed to be happening (nobody had touched the tree after an import of libertas.git in a few weeks last I looked). Plus arguing to keep the ugly HAL code on the basis of future support for a chip which didn't have any code yet doesn't fly as an argument upstream. But that's OK, we should probably re-write the HAL bits anyway if we need to. AFAIK there was no CIS support really in the GPL drop from Marvell; only the abstraction layer that would allow an if_cf.c to be plugged in. But trust me, it was _really_ hard to follow that code. > > The original libertas hardware abstraction bits really sucked. > > Did they release them as GPL as well? Or do you refer to the > copyrighted driver that is downloadable from some vendors? Yes, there were abstraction bits. All the sbi_* functions were part of the base hardware-independent layer, and the if_usb_* bits were USB-specific. But having a hardware abstraction layer that supported only _one_ chip variant doesn't fly upstream, and we were asked to remove it as a condition of merge. > I'm already in libertas-dev, so when I have time to look at the And I or Marcelo should probably join 8385-devel or something too. The libertas-dev list hasn't been very active because only a few people are working on it. Who knows, if you have questions you might even get Ronak to answer them by posting to libertas-dev :) It might be worth a shot. > driver, I'll post some patches there. Rigth now I don't have > much, e.g. I just put the infrastructure in place so that the > PCMCIA subsystem detects the card and loads my driver. Hey, that's a start. I think the next step would be to figure out what hardware-specific pieces need to be abstracted and to start rebuilding a sane HAL, based on what other wireless drivers like airo & orinoco do for the different variants (plx, pci, pcmcia, etc). dan - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-wireless" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
