Re: bcm43236 complient in the compat-wireless-3.6.81???

[Rafał Miłecki <zajec5@xxxxxxxxx>]

2013/12/20 Arend van Spriel <arend@xxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> On 12/20/2013 08:57 AM, Rafał Miłecki wrote:
>> 2013/12/19 Arend van Spriel <arend@xxxxxxxxxxxx>:
>>> It is in the kernel tree under
>>> 'drivers/net/wireless/brcm80211/brcmfmac'. We only support rev 3 because
>>> rev 2 and earlier do not have enough memory to run fullmac firmware.
>>> However, I have not found any rev 3 on the market. If you have please
>>> let me know.
>>
>> Could you say something more about rev 2? How does it work with
>> internal Broadcom driver? Is the firmware stored somewhere else? Does
>> it have some another kind of memory?
>
> It has a split-mac design. So at one end the spectrum there is
> mac80211-type drivers and at the other side are fullmac drivers like
> brcmfmac. rev 2 driver sits right in the middle of that with part of the
> 802.11 stack running on the host and part on the device. This device has
> not enough memory to run the fullmac firmware.

Thanks for your explanation. I think I understand now what means
WLC_HIGH, WLC_LOW, WLC_SPLIT you can see in
0001-Staging-Add-initial-release-of-brcm80211-Broadcom-80.patch. I
guess that softmac devices need WLC_HIGH and WLC_LOW, split devices
(like BCM43231) need WLC_HIGH (because LOW is implemented in firmware)
and full MAC devices need none of above.

As questions about these chipset come over and over, I added a new
section to the brcm80211 wiki page:
http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/brcm80211#Unsupported_Chips
I hope it's OK for you.

Btw. if anyone is interested, I've written a minimal user-space app to
read device info (DL_GETVER) from Broadcom USB dongle.
gcc -lusb-1.0 main.c -o bcmid

-- 
Rafał

#include <stdio.h>
#include <endian.h>
#include <libusb-1.0/libusb.h>

#define BCM_VENDOR_ID	0x0846
#define BCM_DEVICE_ID	0x9011

#define DL_GETVER	5

struct bcmusb_id {
	uint32_t chip;
	uint32_t chiprev;
	/* Below are returned by recent cards only */
	uint32_t ramsize;
	uint32_t remapbase;
	uint32_t boardtype;
	uint32_t boardrev;
};

int main() {
	libusb_context *context = NULL;
	libusb_device_handle *handle;
	struct bcmusb_id id;
	int bytes, err;

	libusb_init(&context);

	handle = libusb_open_device_with_vid_pid(context, BCM_VENDOR_ID, BCM_DEVICE_ID);
	if (!handle) {
		printf("Couldn't find/open %04X:%04X device (is it available? are you root?)\n", BCM_VENDOR_ID, BCM_DEVICE_ID);
		return -1;
	}

	err = libusb_claim_interface(handle, 0);
	if (err) {
		printf("Couldn't claim %04X:%04X device interface (another driver using it?)\n", BCM_VENDOR_ID, BCM_DEVICE_ID);
		return -2;
	}

	bytes = libusb_control_transfer(handle,
					LIBUSB_ENDPOINT_IN | LIBUSB_REQUEST_TYPE_VENDOR | LIBUSB_RECIPIENT_INTERFACE,
					DL_GETVER,
					0, /* wValue */
					0, /* wIndex */
					(unsigned char *)&id,
					sizeof(struct bcmusb_id),
					500);
	if (bytes < 0) {
		printf("libusb_control_transfer error: %d\n", bytes);
		return bytes;
	}
	if (bytes == 8 || bytes == 24) {
		printf("[id]      chip: %04X\n", le32toh(id.chip));
		printf("[id]   chiprev: %04X\n", le32toh(id.chiprev));
		if (bytes == 24) {
			printf("[id]   ramsize: %04X\n", le32toh(id.ramsize));
			printf("[id] remapbase: %04X\n", le32toh(id.remapbase));
			printf("[id] boardtype: %04X\n", le32toh(id.boardtype));
			printf("[id]  boardrev: %04X\n", le32toh(id.boardrev));
		}
	} else {
		printf("libusb_control_transfer returned unexpected amount of bytes (%d)\n", bytes);
		return -3;
	}

	err = libusb_release_interface(handle, 0);
	if (err) {
		printf("Couldn't release %04X:%04X device interface\n", BCM_VENDOR_ID, BCM_DEVICE_ID);
		return -4;
	}

	libusb_close(handle);
	libusb_exit(context);
}