Marvell regulatory domain info storage?

[Mitch Bradley]

The region code, or something equivalent, is a good candidate for the 
"manufacturing data" that Quanta will put in their special section of 
FLASH.  I'm thinking of a two-prong approach:

a) The manufacturing data will include a region code and the driver will 
have a lookup table that maps region code to a list of 
regulatory-approved channels.

b) Optionally, the manufacturing data can also include an explicit 
channel list (probably a bitmask) that, if present, will override the 
region-derived channel list.


Jim Gettys wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-10-01 at 10:55 -0400, Dan Williams wrote:
>   
>> 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?  
>>     
>
> This should be pretty easy.  On the manufacturing line, they know what
> language/keyboard they are loading, and the machine's destination.
>
>   
>> 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.
>>  
>>     
>
> Doesn't help: you could be off frequency for these operations.
>                            - Jim
>
>