[OLPC-devel] Re: OLPC development board

[Marcelo Tosatti]

> Coming back to audio, as Marcelo pointed out in his original email,
> the current patch is not necessarily the right method to solve the
> underlying AC97 + AD18xx conflicting controls issue. The next step is
> to figure out together with the ALSA team a solution that is mergable
> with mainline. I've sent email to Marcelo, Jordan and ALSA folk with
> proposed solutions.

Great!

> One piece of feedback about the board distribution in South Asia. It'd
> be good to include the U.FL 1.9mm female connectors and antennae in a
> board kit together with the board because it's hard to find stores
> here that stock that.
> 
> By the way, the wiki
> http://wiki.laptop.org/index.php/Hardware_specification says:
> Wireless: Marvell 83W8388
> 
> which is getting copied all over the web. I think it should be:
> Marvell_88W8388
> 
> While looking up this chip, I was amused to see
> http://www.free60.org/wiki/Wifi_Adapter:
> 
> Feature of 88W8388: 8385 + TCP/IP termination NAND Flash I/F Audio Codec I/F
> 
> I haven't looked at the specs but maybe that NAND Flash I/F could be
> useful to Dave.

I have no idea what it does and why it is there.

This seems interesting (http://www.commsdesign.com/printableArticle/?articleID=57300160)

"To relieve this type of stress on a host CPU, some companies in the
sector have crafted modules that remove all WLAN processing, including
TCP/IP processing, from the host. With the development of the 88W8388
802.11a/g WLAN chip, Marvell is now bringing this capability down to the
silicon level.

Like past WLAN chips, the 88W8388 combines radio front end, media
access control (MAC), and baseband processing tasks in the same piece
of silicon. The chip is developed around an in-house developed ARM9e
processor, which handles control and MAC processing tasks.

To handle TCP/IP processing, Gopi said that Marvell add acceleration
elements inside the 88W8388. Specifically, Gopi said that the company
implemented certain elements in ROM, such as protocol state machines,
and acceleration in the data path, for tasks such as buffer management,
to perform TCP/IP processing. The company also included a full TCP/IP
stack on chip that runs on a ThreadX RTOS.

Gopi said that on-chip TCP/IP processing added 10-percent to the WLAN
chips power budget and that an overall subsystem, including power amp,
built around the 88W8388 would dissipate less than 650-mW power. He also
said that by handling the TCP/IP processing on-chip, designers could
reduce the power required to terminate a TCP/IP session from 16 mA on a
CPU to 4 mA on the 88W8388 chip."

Unfortunately there are serious drawbacks of using the on-chip TCP/IP stack:
http://linux-net.osdl.org/index.php/TOE