On Jan 23, 2009, at 7:02 PM, Michael Buesch wrote:
On Friday 23 January 2009 18:36:37 Francesco Gringoli wrote:
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 don't think it has enough testing, yet.
Sure, it seems to be stable on _our_ boards but I can't tell if it
shows the same behavior on other hardware revisions.
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 :-) )
I don't think we want to have the firmware in the kernel.
Instead distributions should simply ship the firmware in a package.
That's not our business.
I agree with you, distributions could easily package the firmware and
distribute it to users when it will be stable, I was just wondering
about.
- change the name of the initvals for the opensource firmware: this
Why?
[cut]
initvals have already been uploaded. What can we do?
Nothing. Why do we need to have different names?
Well, I was only considering a question raised by John, we can surely
maintain these names.
- 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?
Yes, well. You're not intermixing an earlier discussion into this,
where
you didn't indicate opensource capabilities to the kernel.
If you indicate OS capabilities, you can use whatever offset you
want, of course.
Excellent. We will modify the firmware accordingly and encode the
options.
- 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.
RTS/CTS is not specific to AP mode. It's used on any station in the
BSS.
See IEEE 802.11 specs.
Yes, in fact 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?
Yes, the old format is deprecated and will be removed soon.
Ok, first task in the todo list!
- 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?
A little bit of b43-asm work is still needed for this core.
There are a few FIXMEs in the code. Not sure, maybe there's more to
do.
I didn't try that, yet.
Before you start, you'll have to verify whether the assembler works
correctly.
Same for the disassembler.
Ok, thanks for the hint. I will check,
Cheers,
-FG
--
Greetings, Michael.
-------
Francesco Gringoli, PhD - Assistant Professor
Dept. of Electrical Engineering for Automation
University of Brescia
via Branze, 38
25123 Brescia
ITALY
Ph: ++39.030.3715843
FAX: ++39.030.380014
WWW: http://www.ing.unibs.it/~gringoli
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