On Tue, 2011-11-29 at 12:52 +0100, Daniel Golle wrote:
> My idea is to have a generic API allowing the user to select configuration
> profiles for external LNA/mixers found in outdoor high-power appliances.
> I also first thought of just using the existing antenna selection API for that,
> but there are good reasons against that:
> * Antenna control API assumes that the allowed values for tx_ant and rx_ant are
> independent of each other. In high-power applications, this is not the case
> (i.e. you'll probably even damage the RX-part of your hardware when selecting
> the same path for RX and TX). Therefore simple bitmasks such as
> available_antennas_rx/tx won't do the job.
> * Both, external mixer and antenna control may be used together in MiMo
> applications, e.g. you may have antennas 0,1 which are controlled by the usual
> antenna selection API and additionally you got an external LNA/mixer which
> allows you to select either the built-in antenna-pair or an externally connected
> one.
> In my example, it looks like this
>
> +---------+ +-------+
> | ---TXa--- |
> | WiFi ---RXa1-- ext. |
> | Chip ---RXa2-- LNA |
> |(AR9285) ......... mixer |
> +---------+ +-------+
>
> You may still want to use antenna selection API to selected either RX-path 0 or
> 1 or both of the AR9285, additionally you want to select a profile for the
> external LNA/mixer.
>
> * As Adrian pointed out and I agree with, it's nice to give the user some
> information about the available configuration profiles, i.e. have user-parsable
> names and descriptions of the different configuration profiles (e.g.
> "built-in"/"external", "horizontal"/"vertical", ...) for the device.
>
> My current solution how things are done in ath9k is specific for the AR9285, but
> once there is a generic infrastructure for this in mac80211, it can be used for
> different solutions, e.g. ath5k-devices with a similar setup which control the
> ext.LNA/mixer using some GPIO PINs.
> In future we may also see devices with several directional MiMo beams and we
> want to select which one(s) to use.
>
> I hope things are more clear now.
Not much to be honest, I have no idea how this works. :-)
For example, this seems like hardware mods, so how does the driver know
what the profiles are?
johannes
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