[Prism54-devel] USB advances

[Jean-Baptiste Note]

Hello,

Le mar 31/08/2004 à 10:12, Luis R. Rodriguez a écrit : 

> My understanding was that there were at least a few USB devices out
> there with a Prism Frisbee chipset. I'm pretty sure the Linksys WUSB54G
> has one. Prism Frisbee chipset-based cards work with our driver -- most
> Cardbus cards are Prism Frisbee based. This is in essence why we started
> prism54-usb CVS tree.
I pried open my wusb54g and behold ! (i'll post photographs as soon as i
put my hands on a numerical camera), the chip is an 
ISL
3880IK
MO323C2A7
You're absolutely right !

> I believe though that most USB devices out there are *do not* have the
> Prism Frisbee chipset and rather an Xbow/Javelin chipset (definitely
> Soft MAC). To support all these we need a new driver.
Two remarks :
-the code currently in CVS does not have any softmac-or-not specific
part. It performs the firmware upload (with some fixes, it works
invariably), and stops there.
-While I gathered quite a few windows logs from people kind enough to
send me some (references on the wiki,
http://prism54.org/phpwiki/Prism54%20USB%20Devel section "helping to
reverse-engeneer the protocol"), I can't find anywhere any windows
driver with the "big" firmware. The extracted firmware are available,
they're all of the "small" type.
Thus i don't have any "reference" snoop log for Frisbee chipsets. But
that would be really cool. Feyd, would you perchance have such a log ?

> OK, first thing we have to do is get a listing of all USB Devices out
> there and see which ones have the Prism Frisbee. We can only work with
> those with the prism54-usb code. 
I'll try to put my hands on a netgear WG111 (smaller than the linksys)
and see what's inside. Is there any way to see this apart from opening
the devices ? This way i could ask others to report about their devices.

> If there's only a few devices out there we might as well just wait and
> start work on the prism54 softmac driver. Conexant was actively working
> with us to provide us specs and a new source base of the softmac driver
> but I recently asked for an update and haven't received a reply. We have
> also not heard from them for about 1-2 months.
> 
This wouldn't be surprising in France, we're on summer vacations :)

> In the worst case scenario they'll never get back to us and all we'd
> have available is this super buggy beta release of the softmac driver to
> work on:
> http://www.dse.co.nz/isroot/dse/support/XH8196-linux.zip
> 
> If you're up for the challenge and don't want to wait until we hear back
> from Conexant you can just start working on cleaning this driver up. The
> first thing you'd have to do is get rid of all that pcmcia-cs dependency
> just as we did with prism54 back last year. I'd work on this but:

I already poked at the code thanks to Stef Simoens... Just a few remarks
(that led me to drop it :/)
*firmware upload, at least, isn't done -at all- in the same way as it is
in both the windows logs and the prism54-usb CVS.
*the firmware that's included in the zip :
Version 2.7.0.0 built on Fri May 28 13:52:04 CEST 2004 by inlbuild at tix
is more recent than anything i've seen so far in the windows logs...
*the driver seems to rely on the (closed-source) "softmac" lib. The
header "softmac2.h" is in a strange licence. You can for instance grep
through the whole source for "prism_softmac_parse_bra", and find only a
usage instance... and a definition in the .lib files :(
*worse, the usb part uses for instance the sm_parse_lmac function (whose
purposes, i guess, are quite similar, but which is neither prototyped
nor defined in the .lib files... In short, the usb part is heavily
non-compilable.

Granted, i didn't put much effort into understanding the code, so i'll
try some more, with more open-mindedness, if you think this is worth
some time.

Furthermore, maybe someone capable would be able, by looking at the
difference between USB and PCI in this driver, to figure out the
USB-specific part and deduce how to work out a smart-firmware version
from the current prism54 code.

Additionaly, Thanks Denis for bringing the issue of the 802.11 stack to
JeffG !

JB