Message-ID: <496F5D4F.3020805@lwfinger.net> (sfid-20090115_165932_015513_3A1094B4)
Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2009 09:59:11 -0600
From: Larry Finger <Larry.Finger@lwfinger.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: Michael Buesch <mb@bu3sch.de>
CC: bcm43xx-dev@lists.berlios.de,
	Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net>, kyle@infradead.org,
	linux-wireless@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [b43] opensource firmware
References: <9FB118DA-845D-4708-84F3-4D51837D8C68@gmail.com>	<1231965922.20309.0.camel@johannes> <200901151637.58196.mb@bu3sch.de>
In-Reply-To: <200901151637.58196.mb@bu3sch.de>
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Sender: linux-wireless-owner@vger.kernel.org

Michael Buesch wrote:
> Yes, please introduce a feature-bitfield at some location in SHM that's unused
> by the proprietary firmware. This bitfields would contain a bit for QoS and
> a bit for hwcrypto.
> Also change your firmware so the driver detects it as open-source firmware.
> I think that's done by writing 0xFFFF to the date/time field in SHM. I don't
> quite remember, but it's something like that.
> Note that this might mean that the firmware watchdog in the driver will trigger,
> as that's enabled by the open-source-firmware-flag. We might want to temporarly
> disable the watchdog in the driver for the time being.

I like the idea of encoding the capabilities in the firmware as it
would be a self-documenting method as the firmware evolves.

Is using the Broadcom names for the firmware the best course of
action? What if the opensource firmware files were named something
like "os-ucode5.fw", etc. and b43 were coded to check for those files
first? It would then fall back to the standard firmware if the
opensource version is not found.

Larry