On Friday 11 November 2016 18:20:50 Pali Rohár wrote: > Hi! I will open discussion about mac address and calibration data for > wl1251 wireless chip again... > > Problem: Mac address & calibration data for wl1251 chip on Nokia N900 > are stored on second nand partition (mtd1) in special proprietary format > which is used only for Nokia N900 (probably on N8x0 and N9 too). > Wireless driver wl1251.ko cannot work without mac address and > calibration data. > > Absence of mac address cause that driver generates random mac address at > every kernel boot which has couple of problems (unstable identifier of > wireless device due to udev permanent storage rules; unpredictable > behaviour for dhcp mac address assignment, mac address filtering, ...). > > Currently there is no way to set (permanent) mac address for network > interface from userspace. And it does not make sense to implement in > linux kernel large parser for proprietary format of second nand > partition where is mac address stored only for one device -- Nokia N900. > > Driver wl1251.ko loads calibration data via request_firmware() for file > wl1251-nvs.bin. There are some "example" calibration file in linux- > firmware repository, but it is not suitable for normal usage as real > calibration data are per-device specific. > > So questions are: > > 1) How to set mac address from userspace for that wl1251 interface? In > userspace I can write parser for that proprietary format of nand > partition and extract mac address from it Proposed solutions for 1) * Introduce new IOCL for setting that permanent mac address from userspace. Currently we have IOCL for get request * Use request_firmware() (with flag from 2)) to ask for mac address from userspace. This is already used by wl12xx driver (as mac address is part of calibration data firmware file) * Allow to set mac address via sysfs file, e.g. /sys/class/ieee80211/phy0/macaddress > 2) How to send calibration data to wl1251 driver? Those are again stored > in proprietary format and I can write userspace parser for it. Proposed solution for 2) Introduce new flag for request_firmware(), so it first try to use userspace helper for loading firmware file with possibility to fallback to direct VFS access. So... what do you think about it? -- Pali Rohár pali.rohar@xxxxxxxxx
