Marvell

[Dan Williams]

On Thu, 2007-09-13 at 12:27 +0200, David Woodhouse wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-09-13 at 06:12 -0400, Bernardo Innocenti wrote:
> > > There was an alternative libertas driver which uses the device in 'dumb'
> > > mode with the kernel's mac80211 stack. Coupled with mesh support in
> > > mac80211 that might make a somewhat suboptimal alternative to truly free
> > > firmware.
> > 
> > Fascinating.  This way at least we use a smaller portion of the closed
> > firmware.  Where is this driver maintained?  
> 
> 'Maintained' is a bit of a strong word.... what we have is found at
> http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/libertas-dev/2007-August/000641.html

That's the 8335 though, which is much more of a softmac part than the
8388.  The two are not driver level or firmware level compatible :(

Dan

> > And is mesh networking really (going to be) supported in softmac?
> 
> It's a safe bet that the mac80211 stack will grow 802.11s support at
> some point. It may well be useful for us to do it relatively soon. We
> could use _any_ Linux-supported softmac card to interact with the mesh
> that way.
> 
> > I'd suggest whoever starts a firmware rewriting effort to go this
> > route, at least initially.  So they can relay on known-good mac80211
> > code while rewriting just a tiny low-level RF driver.
> 
> s/known-good/debuggable/ -- and it might not require too many changes to
> the existing firmware.
> 
> In the long run, softmac¹ definitely isn't the way to go for XO -- even
> if you switch it to being completely autonomous while the XO is off, you
> just don't want to be processing all the infrastructure stuff on the
> Geode. For _debugging_ generic mesh stuff, however, I suspect that's
> precisely how we want it.
> 
> When it comes to time to thinking about Gen2... CSR have fullmac devices
> and a whole lot of Linux clue. Definitely worth investigating.
>