Marvell regulatory domain info storage?

[Krishna Sankar (ksankar)]

As you mentioned, we would need the country specific flashes and that
would be a good place for the region codes as well. The only caveat is,
what happens when a kid with a laptop goes from one country to another ?


An alternative is to tie-in the region codes with some related GUI
element, like the Time Zone. 

May be, a combination - the default region code set in flash, which
becomes the norm after reset et al. Plus a hook to change it, tied to
TZ, (i.e. if a TZ - which necessities a change in region code - is set,
reset the region code as well) and a GUI to set the region code
independent of anything else. If we have the automatic time sync, this
will get more interesting ...

I think we can provide the coarse APIs (getCurrentRegionCode(),
SetRegionCode()) and (under the cover) required steps (rewrite, reset et
al) to make this happen. We would need to maintain the RegionCode-TZ
mapping somewhere in the flash or embedded as a hardware table in the
OS.

One point to explore - is the region code mandatory and is the Marvell
chip capable of all region codes or do we need different Marvell chips
for different regions ?

Cheers
<k/> 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: devel-bounces at laptop.org 
> [mailto:devel-bounces at laptop.org] On Behalf Of Dan Williams
> Sent: Sunday, October 01, 2006 7:56 AM
> To: devel at laptop.org
> Cc: Michail Bletsas; libertas-dev at lists.infradead.org
> Subject: Marvell regulatory domain info storage?
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Talking with Mitch this week brought up an interesting 
> question.  Where regulatory domain information for the 
> wireless stored?  We have to know what channels we can(not) 
> operate on for a given country, and therefore must 
> communicate that information to the laptop.
> 
> Does the Marvell chip have internal EEPROM that we write the 
> appropriate region code to?  Or must we pull that value from 
> the SPI flash and write it to the card during init?  It 
> appears that the driver pulls a preset region code from the 
> card, see wlan_ret_get_hw_spec() in wlan_cmdresp.c.
> That indicates that the region code is either in (a) 
> firmware, or (b) in EEPROM on the card.  The region code may 
> apparently be set from userspace with a private ioctl.
> 
> Thoughts?  At worst, we do country-specific flashes, which we 
> were already going to do for fonts & translations.  At best, 
> the server and/or firstboot process communicates region code somehow.
>  
> Dan
> 
> 
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