Libertas thinmac/hostmode driver for Joyride kernels

[Deepak Saxena]

Hi,

Cozybit has been working on new thinmac firmware for the Libertas
chip that allows use of the chip in hostmode and I've built it 
against our Joyride kernels so that others can play around with it
and provide feedback.

You will need to do the following:

Install a recent joyrid. Latest is best and as of 2239, the kernel 
include network bridging enabled as a module, which is useful for
WiFi <-> Wired 

Download libertastf and helper modules from
http://dev.laptop.org/~dsaxena/libertastf_modules/ and copy
these on the XO to /root/libertastf

On the XO (mostly copied from wiki:Libertas_Thinfirmware_HOWTO):

# cd /lib/firmware
# wget http://dev.laptop.org/pub/firmware/libertas/thinfirm/lbtf_usb-5.132.2.p3.bin
# ln -s lbtf_usb-5.132.2.p3.bin lbtf_usb.bin
# rmmod usb8xxx
# rmmod libertastf
# cd /root/libertastf
# insmod cfg80211.ko
# insmod mac80211.ko
# insmod libertastf.ko
# insmod libertastf_usb.ko
# ifconfig wlan0 up

At this point network manager should take over and associate with your
network of choice. Note that suspend/resume does not work with the
thinmac driver and if you do suspend/resume, you will need to
rmmod the libertas_usb driver and then reload it.

To use the XO as an AP (I haven't tested this yet), see wiki:XO_as_AP.

If you want to just boot to the libertastf driver by default, you can do:

# mv /root/libertastf /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/net/wireless
# mv /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/libertas /root
# depmod -a

On reboot, the libertastf driver will load and manage the card. 
To return to previous state of using the fullmac driver:

# mv /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/libertastf /root
# mv /root/libertas /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/net/wireless
# depmod -a

I know this is not the most user-friendly method of using the driver
but should let folks play with it until I figure out a better way
to package it. The issue is that the driver requires the latest
mac80211 codebase and backporting this to our 2.6.25 kernel turned
out to be a massive nightmare. I ended up using the compat-wireless 
package [1] to build the lateset 802.11 codebase out-of-tree from
our kernel.  We need create a separate RPM or a set of scripts that 
end-users can use to install the drivers on their systems.

Enjoy,
~Deepak

[1] http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Download 

-- 
Deepak Saxena - Kernel Developer - dsaxena at laptop.org