[Prism54-users] p54u 0.6 released

[Sebastien]

Hello list !

This major release includes many changes coming from firmware reverse 
engineering.

First, it includes basic support for FreeMAC, the firmware we are rewriting 
from scratch (currently unusable for normal users).
To reflect this change, the firmware files and the utilities have been renamed
(because "LMAC", "LMTERM" and "SMCTL" refer to Conexant's system)

Moreover, the driver is now able to compute the X2 header on its own (needed 
for uploading firmware on the 3887), allowing arbitrary code execution on 
this chip.
In previous versions, this header had to be extracted from Windows drivers 
logs.

The memory allocation system (from which comes the previously called "SoftMAC 
addresses") has been reverse engineered. Most of the device's failures came 
from the poor handling of those in previous p54u versions.

All the SoftMAC protocol code has been rewritten and cleaned up. The driver 
architecture has been completely reworked, it is far more stable and no 
longer relies on giant locking.

We got GPL code extracted from AP firmwares, which allowed to rewrite a quite 
complete BRA parser, allowing the driver to probe various options about the 
firmware it's currently loading (and which were poorly defined as constants 
in previous versions).
This allows automatic FreeMAC firmware detection, among others.
(FreeMAC developers : for this to work, you need to add a BRA with firmware 
type set to "FMAC" instead of "LM86"/"LM87" - I'll update the online version 
soon)

Download this code from http://lekernel.lya-fr.com/prism54_freebsd.html

Regards,
Sebastien