---------- Forwarded Message ---------- Subject: opensource firmware Date: Friday 09 January 2009 From: Francesco Gringoli <francesco.gringoli@xxxxxxxxxxxx> To: bcm43xx-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Hello folks, we have been involved in the past few months in testing modifications to the standard 802.11 MAC for research purposes. During this time we did some tests with Broadcom 802.11b/g boards and we wrote down a simple 802.11 compliant firmware that we used as a starting point for the modified MAC algorithms. Although the base firmware is not fully 802.11 compliant, e.g., it does not support RTS/CTS procedure or QoS, we believe that someone could be interested in testing it. The firmware does not require the kernel to be modified and it uses the same shared memory layout and global registers usage of the original stuff from broadcom to ease loading by the b43 driver (and ease our writing...). We wrote it to make the b43 driver recognize it as Broadcom version 5 firmware: it still uses the original initval files of that version of the Broadcom's firmware, we do not include them as usual users have to extract these files following the b43 installation instructions. Lorenzo and I tested this firmware only on 4306 and 4318 hardware (pci and minipci, pc-card based architectures seem to have problems), and we did simple tests on the integrated board of a Linksys WRT54GL, so we are quite sure it runs on 4306, 4318 and 4320 cards. We did all the works on kernel 2.6.27-rc5-wl. The firmware along with the instructions to build it from the assembly code using the tools developed by the b43 community can be found here http://www.ing.unibs.it/openfwwf In the firmware website you can find more information about the fw algorithm, its interaction with Broadcom hardware and other information that we discovered as we were writing it. We would like to underline that this work would have not been possible without the instruments already developed by the b43 community (assembler/disassembler), hardware specifications (sipsolution's website), the opensource test firmware written by Michael Buesch and useful talks with those guys (b43 developers), which we deeply acknowledge. As we used several definition files written by Michael for its firmware and we have prepared a source tar file that includes them, we kindly ask Michael if this could be a problem. Finally we stress that this is a TEST firmware and some stuff needs to be fixed (e.g. RTS/CTS and QoS), we have been using it as a starting point to implement other MAC algorithms for research purposes: if someone is interested in this kind of work and would like to share ideas also on research topics, please let us know. Cheers, Francesco Gringoli Lorenzo Nava _______________________________________________ Bcm43xx-dev mailing list Bcm43xx-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/bcm43xx-dev ------------------------------------------------------- -- Greetings, Michael. -- 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
