[Prism54-devel] Re: Re: Prism54 development update

[Johannes Steingraeber]

On Mon, Jan 10, 2005 at 11:48:49AM +0100, Jean-Baptiste Note wrote:
> Well first it seems firmwares for fullmac chipsets are universal. Why
> would it be different for softmac chips ?
> 
> Secondly, you may think that for my linksys device, which is a net2280 +
> fullmac chip, the "softmac firmware" uploaded to it would be found in
> PCI softmac drivers if the net2280 only did bridging. This does not seem
> to be the case.

I've done some research in the list archive.

NetChip asked for help answered to bse:

On Tue, 06 Apr 2004 12:14:49 +0200, bse wrote:
>> The WLAN adapters using the Net2280 fall into two general groups:
> [...]
>> The second group is more difficult.  These are proprietary systems
>> using device-to-host communication schemes (and therefore host-side
>> drivers) that are vendor-specific.  We (NetChip) don't know what those
>> vendor-specific communication schemes are, so I'm afraid we can't be
>> of any help to get the linux driver working.

So we seem to be confronted with a great variation of possible
implementations :-(

But on the other hand examining 

  http://yoshiyo.ath.cx/seb/download/NET2280_EEPROM.bin

the only visible (Unicode) text is

  NET2280 in Transfer Mode
  Netchip Technology, Inc.

I remember that NetChip somewhere mentions a reference design available
for customers...

At the moment I do not see different net2280 EEPROM contents
customised by each vendor, but maybe we should collect some more.

For me it looks like the net2280 is always used in the same way
but we are seeing different firmwares because there is more than one
way to adapt (or strip down) the ISL firmware to net2280.

BTW there must be something wrong with NET2280_EEPROM.bin, AFAIK 8051
does start at address 0 but there is no meaningful boot code at that
offset.

Regards
	Johannes
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