[Prism54-devel] usb devel info

[Jean-Baptiste Note]

Dear list,

First, a big thank you to Luis for putting things back up !
Happy new year to all ; may this be the year of softmac support :)

As far as usb is concerned :

First, booting the device should now be correctly handled even after the
device has already booted. This means that you don't have to
unplug/replug the device after you've done ifconfig up once. you can
ifconfig down, ifconfig up at leisure (tested even when the device is
left in a bas state), without manual intervention.  

This, with the addition of an iwpriv command that allows you to send
what i call "announced packets" (ie, 0f 00 40 00 04 or something
followed by a real packets, frequency change for instance, or bss
settings), and a small emacs script to do this from usbsnoop logs, makes
testing on the protocol really sweet (you browse usbsnoop logs, modify
packets, then send them to the device from within emacs, then if you've
stuck the device, simply down/up it).

The iwpriv addition is a kludge though, does anyone knows if libusb
allows you to "inject" packets into a device that has already be claimed
by a driver ?

Last thing, discussion with Sebastien lead to the following conclusion :
the work on usb will not be directly applicable to softmac pci cards,
but looking at the ndis API, pci snooping should be feasible in software
only (the ndis API recommends the call of synchronisation functions
before the driver accesses host/card shared memory). That is, other
synchronization methods are certainly possible, but if the windows
driver code is clean, then we have hope -- to be tested soon !

PS: Luis, i don't know if / how much you pay for bandwidth, but i have a
DSL line with 1,2Mb of upload of which i don't do anything ( i stopped
using mldonkey for ethical reasons :), i'd be happy to give you root
access to the box if you want to offload something from prism54.org

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