[Prism54-devel] Re: compilable source of 1.0.4.3

[Sebastien]

> 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 !)

> 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).

> 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 ?

> 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.

> 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 ?

Regards,
Sebastien