[Prism54-devel] Re: compilable source of 1.0.4.3

[Luis R. Rodriguez]

On 9/24/05, Sebastien <sebastien.bourdeauducq at gmail.com> wrote:
> > BTW -- the kernel has tons of cheesy .h files which are used to
> > compile firmware objects. Alan Cox is known for doing this with his
> > drivers which require firmware...
>
> I think the "firmware_class" system from hotplug is way better (no waste of
> memory, no licensing problems) ; and especially when experimenting with
> FreeMAC : to test whether your changes work (and when programming without the
> docs you *do* need to do this a lot, you know...) you just need to change a
> file and reset your device, instead of recompiling the driver, unloading it
> and reloading it.
>
> BTW, I'll even add an ioctl in p54u soon, which will reset the device (seems
> like the Prism power supply can even be controlled from the NET2280 on v1)
> and re-send the firmware. So testing a new FreeMAC hack will just be a shell
> command away (and my USB ports will like that very much !)

True, point taken.

> > What saddens me is just the way FullMAC cards came off
> > the shelves..
>
> FreeMAC should be compatible with all chips (FullMAC and SoftMAC v1 and v2)
> with minor changes.
>
> > How are SoftMAC v1 and v2 doing nowadays -- are they
> > still being sold?
>
> Yes, they are. Even v1 can still be found (I have a friend who bought one two
> months ago).

Ah, I haven't seen any in local shops around NJ, USA.

> > I wanted to appologize for my lack of participation lately. What can I
> > say -- my job (Vonage) has me working long hours and the engagement
> > has me working hard on quality time with the gf :P. Oh also, ALL of my
> > FullMAC cardbus cards have gone bad. I had about 4 -- all purchased.
> > Some died naturally, some broke..
> > Then I had gotten 4 donated PCI
> > cards. 2 didn't work upon arrival, 1 went bad. The 4th one may still
> > work -- I have to check :-P
>
> What do you mean by "broken" ? How ? Can't they really be fixed ?

Broke -- people stepped on them, the others just stopped listening to IRQs.

> > What sucks about FullMAC cards is they don't sell them
> > anymore.. or at least I haven't seen them sold anymore except on ebay.
>
> This won't be a problem anymore with FreeMAC.
>
> By the way, do you have any documentation about the inner workings of the
> FullMAC chips, or about their PCI interface ? It's quite the same on SoftMAC
> chips.

All documentation I received from intersil was the original source, that's all.

> > I think I have a USB card I bought a while ago.. and also an
> > experimental  SoftMAC intersil cardbus card intel sent me a while
> > back. I  haven't touched SoftMAC stuff at all though.. I really want
> > to just finish prism54 (WPA, add this FreeMAC upstream,
>
> FreeMAC will never work with your prism54 without major code changes. To keep
> it compatible with all chips, we need to make the protocol low-level and
> offload as much as possible to the host (just like the SoftMAC design does).
> We can't reimplement FullMAC.
>
> By the way, did you made the tarballs of the prism54 website so that I can
> upload them to Tuxfamily and begin working on the website ?

No, but I just created the html/php one. Lets start off with that
first. I'll e-mail you privately next.