Hello,
we have been testing the firmware for a week now and it seems stable.
I personally tested it also on a Linksys WRT54GL and it works both in
station and in AP modes. I collected the feedbacks that some of you
sent and it seems that the firmware now runs on these board:
- 4306, 4311, 4318, 4320
I was considering the suggestions you all gave me a few days ago and
other questions related to the possible integration of this firmware
into the kernel, and I came to these conclusions/questions (please
forgive me for this long message :-) )
- change the name of the initvals for the opensource firmware: this
seems a little bit complicated as now the decision about the initval-
files' names and the detection of the firmware type are respectively
based on the phy type and on the firmware date. This means that
initval-files' names can be determine as soon as the hardware type has
been probed, while the firmware needs to be started before the kernel
can determine if it is opensource or not: at this time, however, the
initvals have already been uploaded. What can we do?
- detection of the opensource firmware capabilities: are you really
sure we cannot use a shm location that the bcm proprietary firmware
uses for some other purpose? Once, in fact, the kernel has determined
that the firmware is opensource it can also use a given location in a
different manner than it would do for a proprietary firmware. However
this is not a problem at all :-) as we can use one location in the
"high" shm-memory area, let's say > 0xb00, just choose one.
- what to do with rts procedure: we can implement this feature easily
but I'm not sure about the value it can add to people (the majority of
users?) that use the bcm board in station mode. This is different for
those who run a bcm card in AP mode, but we can clearly discourage
them to run this firmware in AP mode if not sure about rts usage by
stations. However, we put this task in the todo list.
- tx header layout: the opensource firmware is now using the old
memory layout in the tx header (<351). Do you think switching to 410
format is mandatory now or we can concentrate on the other tasks?
- I would like to start considering N-phy on the firmware side. I have
a late 2008 MacBook Pro and I'm not sure if beginning this work on
this platform is a waste of time or not as Apple could have asked
Broadcom a customized chipset. Should I start or is it better if I buy
a N-phy pci board for my x86 box?
Thank you for your time.
Cheers,
-FG
--
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
