[Prism54-devel] USB CVS snapshot

[Jean-Baptiste Note]

Hello Feyd,

> After some thinking I now think that the USB dongles will not work with the
> old firmware:
>
>           *----------*         *----------*
>           | NET2280  |         | ISL3890  |            /
>  -- USB --|          |-- PCI --|          |-- 802.11 ---
>           | 8051 CPU |         | ARM CPU  |            \
>           | FIRMWARE |         | FIRMWARE |
>           *----------*         *----------*
>
> The firmware in the NET2280 likely expects interaction with the SoftMAC
> firmware. On the other hand it should be possible to read the EEPROM and
> the NET2280 firmware, which I think will be only few kB large, and learn
> the SoftMAC API from that (at least its data transfer part).
>

This is true unless the logic in the net2280 does very low-level work,
for instance only translates operations on the PCI bus. Having a look at
the exchanges on the 0x82 pipe, you'll see that the driver sends to the
net2280 frames of zeros preceeded by addresses. PCI-wise this would corresponds
to a DMA buffer, i'm sure. (they were values i didn't know how to interpret
before running ndiswrapper in full debug mode and seeing that they realy
were urbs addresses)

In this case, the net2280 could implement only the logic to map DMA
transferts to USB transfers, and not interract at all with the firmware
; in the same way i guess the net2280 vendor could sell glue code
translating a windows PCI driver to a USB driver with practically no change.

Well, this is what i'd do if i had to design such a system
(orthogonality), and all evidences point to this in the windows driver.

That's the reason why i still look to a usb device using the big
firmware. But maybe this is a pipe-dream, who knows :)

-- 
Jean-Baptiste Note
+33 (0)6 83 03 42 38
jean-baptiste.note at wanadoo.fr