On Wed, 2011-02-09 at 23:53 +0100, RafaÅ MiÅecki wrote: > OK, I think I'll need some your help with better understanding SSB. > > AFAIK SSB is "box" (ssb_bus) containing cores (ssb_devices). SSB and AI are just simple interconnects that can be used on-chip or on embedded boards. The devices connected to this interconnect (or bus) are the "cores". > How do we talk with SSB? Is this that magic "Hostbus"? What does it > mean? Do we use one of the cores of ssb_bus to talk? Is this why I see > "ssb: Core 2 found: PCI-E (cc 0x820, rev 0x02, vendor 0x4243)"? If > only one core can be selected at time, how is this possible we selecre > 802.11 core and we are still able to talk with SSB? That completely depends on what hostbus we're on. It's completely hidden by SSB's I/O ops. For the trivial case without any hostbus (embedded), the cores are simply mapped into MMIO one after another. For the PCI hostbus case, the MMIO has to be remapped (through PCI config space) on each core switch. (Core switches are completely hidden from the device drivers). PCMCIA and SDIO are similar. > What are the other cores for? Why do we need driver for chipcommon, > mipscore? Are that cores internally accessed by 80211 core? The chipcommon is a management core for the interconnect. Device drivers are (mostly) distinct. There are a few exceptions. Built-in device drivers (drivers/ssb/driver_....c) have some interdependencies. However, b43, b44 and ssb-gige are completely independent, for example. > What is that whole AI? Is that replacement for SSB? Does it also > contains cores? What AI and SSB share? It is a replacement that shares some register API and design decisions with SSB. People who worked some time with broadcom stuff will recognize the pattern: Take old stuff -> redesign it -> put lots of workarounds and patching layers on top of it to be theoretically compatible with old code -> fail at being fully compatible -> release it. -- 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
