From: Michael Buesch <mb@bu3sch.de>
To: bcm43xx-dev@lists.berlios.de
Subject: Re: [b43] opensource firmware
Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2009 16:44:13 +0100
Cc: Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net>,
	Lorenzo Nava <navalorenx@gmail.com>, kyle@infradead.org,
	linux-wireless@vger.kernel.org
References: <9FB118DA-845D-4708-84F3-4D51837D8C68@gmail.com> <1231965922.20309.0.camel@johannes> <200901151637.58196.mb@bu3sch.de>
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On Thursday 15 January 2009 16:37:57 Michael Buesch wrote:
> On Wednesday 14 January 2009 21:45:22 Johannes Berg wrote:
> > 
> > > Initvals and new firmware version can be found at http://www.ing.unibs.it/openfwwf
> > 
> > I suggest that before this is packaged, we change it so b43 can
> > recognise it and automatically disable qos and hwcrypto.
> 
> 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.
> 

Ah and also note that hwcrypto is already automagically disabled, if the driver
detects an opensource-firmware.
To make the driver detect the firmware as opensource, write 0xFFFF to SHM_UCODEDATE

You need to disable the watchdog in b43_periodic_every15sec(), if you don't implement
the watchdog mechanism in your firmware. But it's pretty easy to implement.
It just has to write 0 to some register in the MAC loop. Of course, the register has
to be unused in the rest of the code.

-- 
Greetings, Michael.