Subject: Re: Marvell 88w8385 Support
From: Dan Williams <dcbw@redhat.com>
To: tsr <tsr.offentlig@tsr.se>
Cc: linux-wireless@vger.kernel.org
In-Reply-To: <1231959472.14909.73.camel@localhost.localdomain>
References: <496C8468.4060101@tsr.se>  <20090113145213.GA3623@tuxdriver.com>
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Content-Type: text/plain
Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2009 12:36:30 -0500
Message-Id: <1232127390.22915.9.camel@174-147-64-233.pools.spcsdns.net> (sfid-20090116_183801_834702_A494FE1A)
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Sender: linux-wireless-owner@vger.kernel.org

On Wed, 2009-01-14 at 13:57 -0500, Dan Williams wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-01-14 at 19:35 +0100, tsr wrote:
> > John Daiker wrote:
> > > On 01/14/2009 08:47 AM, Dan Williams wrote:
> > >> On Tue, 2009-01-13 at 09:52 -0500, John W. Linville wrote:
> > >>   
> > >>> On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 01:09:12PM +0100, tsr wrote:
> > >>>     
> > >>>> Hi,
> > >>>>
> > >>>> I have a FSG-3 that includes a Marvell 88w8385 card. I wonder if there
> > >>>> is support for it in recent kernels. According to
> > >>>> http://marc.info/?l=linux-wireless&m=123178916308198&w=2 (search for
> > >>>> 8385) there seems to be support but I don't want to start messing 
> > >>>> around
> > >>>> with kernels and stuff without being sure.
> > >>>>        
> > >>> That driver is for SDIO hardware.  It looks like your FSG-3 has
> > >>> mini-PCI?  Either way, we don't have a driver merged yet that would
> > >>> cover your hardware.
> > >>>      
> > >>
> > >> Looks like it's a CB35, which is actually an 88w8335 MiniPCI card.
> > >> Would be supported by the mwl8k driver ideally.  I've started on trying
> > >> to add support to mwl8k for the 8335 parts, but we'll need to split the
> > >> driver so that we can create IO hooks for the different parts.  It'll be
> > >> a bit, but we'll get there.
> > >>
> > >> Dan
> > >>    
> > > Very interested in the progress of 8335 support at some point.  My 
> > > Netgear wg311v3 is sitting on my desk... waiting for some Linux bits to 
> > > get it running!
> > > 
> > > I can assist in testing whenever bits become available ( officially or 
> > > unofficially, hint, hint! :-P )
> > > 
> > > Thanks for the hard work, and keep them bits a comin'
> > > 
> > > JD
> > > 
> > 
> > Thanks for the info, I've found something that is said to be a working 
> > drivers for 'my' card in this package: 
> > http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/maxtor/en_us/downloads/MSSII_3.1.2.src.tgz
> > 
> > The kernel source says it's some kind of 2.6 kernel, grepping for it I 
> > found the highest number to be 2.6.14 so maybe it is possible to use 
> > something from it.
> > 
> > AFAIK it's also GPL.
> 
> Wow, that is the right driver...  haven't seen a driver for the 8335
> before, but there it is, and it's GPL too.  Got the firmware too, which
> I also haven't seen separately.
> 
> The path forward with this is to port the support for the hardware over
> to mwl8k since the firmware interface is almost the same.
> 
> That said, the only reason I chose that as the path forward was that we
> couldn't make any progress with the standalone driver, and figured that
> Marvell's driver would actually work where mrv8k didn't.  I still think
> it makes sense to use the same driver core for both but if that turns
> out to be too hard, we can just do a mac80211 port for this.

As a follow-up... the driver source contained in that tarball compiles
after a few trivial changes to update net80211 and hardware parts to the
latest kernel.  However, the firmware does not successfully load.  It
appears that the firmware load procedure for the MSSII driver is a
one-stage firmware load that probably depends on a minimal bootloader on
firmware of the card, or something like that.  In any case, it doesn't
work.

I spent some time porting over the firmware loading from mrv8k (which is
known to work), and got as far as successful boot and main firmware
load, but I'm not having a ton of success getting the card to actually
boot the main firmware.  More poking required.  If the MSSII driver can
actually *drive* 8335 cards, then we can use that as a reference for
hardware/firmware API when adding support for 8335 to mwl8k.

Dan