On Saturday 01 May 2010 12:19:11 David H. Lynch Jr. wrote: > I have ethernet driver experience but not wifi. I have a project to > add some features to the ar9170 that will require additions to the > firmware. I would appreciate pointers for docs etc. to get me started. Well, for starters the ar9170 uses a ZyDas MAC (aka ZD1221) and a AR900x PHY/Radio. Therefore the phy code and registers are very similar to those #definitions you can find in ath9k. And for the MAC code & registers you can look into zd1211rw, or look into drivers/staging/otus (original vendor driver, shares some code with their windows drivers) AFAICT, there are no technical documents about the AR9170 solution available w/o signing a NDA with Atheros (probably because the devices are still produced and sold in high quantities?). > What is available for the ar9170 itself ? > How does the firmware and the linux driver communicate? > Is there an overview of the firmware - what is where ? not really, apart from the headers of the original firmware and vendor drivers. But if you really need to implement some of your 'features' (what are they, if I may ask?) into the firmware you could save some time by migrating to carl9170 code base: ( http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/chr/carl9170/1.0.5 + linville's wireless-testing.git ) The advantages over the original firmware code (from a developers POV) are: * customizable/configurable fw + driver can auto detect all selected fw features * userspace testbench ( carlu ) for the usb subsystem (allows you to run usb stress-test, dump the device's eeprom content to stdout and of course: you can implement your own routines and test & develop without crashing the kernel) * all hardware & firmware interface definitions are all located in a single directory /include/shared/*.h version.h - carl9170 API/ABI version eeprom.h - eeprom layout phy.h - AR900x PHY/Radio definitions fwcmd.h - implemented firmware commands fwdesc.h - layout of the firmware descriptor (e.g. available/activated features) hw.h - ZD1221 MAC + (Faraday USB) definitions wlan.h - (part of hw.h & phy.h) contains all the information about tx & rx frame formats. * (tiny) printf + hexdump (obviously, you want those ;-) ) * follows linux' kernel coding style :-D Regards, Chr -- 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
