Hello.
Background:
With the atusb device we have the possibility to store some data in
EEPROM as non-volatile memory. Qi hardware as the company behind this
devices also has an IEEE OUI assigned which we can use for a range of
valiud and unique EUI64 addresses we can use as permanent extended
addresses in IEEE 802.15.4
http://en.qi-hardware.com/wiki/IEEE_OUI_assignments
Status:
o I enhanced the firmware to access the EEPROM to allow write and
update/read operations
o A new command allows the reading of the whole EUI64 over usb (ATUSB_EUI64)
o The ATUSB_EUI64 command is used in the atusb driver to read the
address during probe and set it correctly for the default wpan0
interface. This basically replaces the
ieee802154_random_extended_addr() call.
o The above is tested and works fine with a device being unplugged and
re-plugged and still showing the permanent address read from EEPROM.
Update/Write Strategy:
Right now i changed the firmware to intercept write to the IEEE_ADDR
register which gets updated whenever the hardware address filter
callback fires. (adding a new interface with extended address and
bringing it up is such a case). This is hacky and comes with some side
effects like your "permanent" address gets overridden by bringing up an
interface :)
I also thought about exposing a sysfs entry to write the new address.
This would allow an easy way to change it right through the kernel
driver. Easy to use but also kind of violates the idea of having a
"permanent" address which is not touched by the driver at all. I chatted
a bit with Phobe on IRC about it and really the solution that seems to
make most sense is to have a small host utility that uses libusb to read
and write the EUI64 to the device. It would be combined with a simple
list of known serial numbers and their mapped allocated address.
For this I will remove the intercepting part of the firmware and expose
the writes through another ATUSB command over USB.
Let me know if you think this goes into the wrong direction. I will be
working on this over the next days.
regards
Stefan Schmidt
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