[PATCH] libertas: add sysfs hooks to update boot2 and persistent firmware

[Dan Williams]

On Tue, 2008-06-03 at 13:49 -0400, Michail Bletsas wrote:
> Dan Williams <dcbw at redhat.com> wrote on 06/03/2008 01:20:11 PM:
> 
> > On Tue, 2008-06-03 at 13:03 -0400, Michail Bletsas wrote:
> > > Dan Williams <dcbw at redhat.com> wrote on 06/03/2008 11:26:21 AM:
> > > 
> > > 
> > > > > > 
> > > > > It is not a matter of Python vs C.
> > > > > The userspace tool is extremely awkward to use (since it requires 
> the 
> > > > > driver modules to be unloaded which in turn makes the 
> identification 
> > > of 
> > > > 
> > > > How does it make the ID more difficult?  What do we need besides the
> > > > bcdDevice ID that tells us what boot2 version the device has?  Is 
> there
> > > > something more needed to find out if the device has larger EEPROM 
> for
> > > > active antenna support perhaps?
> > > 
> > > It makes it more difficult because instead of network interfaces 
> (eth0, 
> > > eth1 etc), one ends up having to deal with USB ids.
> > > In devices with multiple intefaces (an XO with an active antenna for 
> > > example), that is very confusing.
> > 
> > This is fair; except that the network interface name is subject to
> > change and you can't guarantee that eth0 will always be the same device
> > unless you use something like udev rules to rename devices on the fly
> > when they are plugged in based on the device's MAC address, which
> > requires loading the driver first.  The kernel has never had a guarantee
> > about device ordering.
> > 
> > So if you _really_ want to make sure you're updating the right device,
> > then you get Marvell to start putting real serial #s into the USB
> > interface's serial number slot instead of 0.  My usb8388 says:
> > 
> >   bcdDevice           31.02
> >   iManufacturer           1 Marvell
> >   iProduct                2 MARVELL Wireless Device
> >   iSerial                 0   <-------------------------
> >   bNumConfigurations      1
> > 
> > that's the only way to guarantee that you're updating the device you
> > want to update.
> > 
> That's a good suggestion.
> From a practical perspective though, in XOs, the onboard interface is 
> always eth0 these days.

Yes, but I thought the discussion was more about active antenna updates,
where you may have more than one usb8388, and thus you actually care
about updating a specific adapter.  In the normal XO case, you only have
one usb8388, and thus the userspace flash tool will work just fine.

Dan