XO-2

[Alex Belits]

C. Scott Ananian wrote:
> On 5/22/08, Alex Belits <abelits at phobos.illtel.denver.co.us> wrote:
>> Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:
>>> I believe item k) was already in the contracts with Quanta and Marvell,
> 
> Just to clarify: Carl-Daniel is not an OLPC employee, and is not
> speaking for OLPC.
> 
>>  I am still trying to find out, whom am I supposed to ask at Marvell to give
>> the documentation and/or pieces of whatever source Marvell can release (in
>> whatever shape) to me and other volunteers interested in work on wireless
>> firmware, so we can make an open source version of libertas firmware. It
>> looks like everyone is discouraged to even hope for it at this point.
> 
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Marvell_microkernel

My name is uselessly gathering dust on that page for two months already.

> A more constructive suggestion might be to support
> http://open80211s.org/ , which is basically all of the wireless
> firmware except the lowest-level hardware-specific stuff.

Except the project is about Linux driver, not firmware.

The whole reason why Libertas chipset was chosen, was the fact that it 
can perform mesh routing by ARM-based system-on-chip wireless chipset 
while kernel is not running on the main CPU, thanks to extremely thick 
"lowest-level hardware-specific stuff" -- a large piece of stack 
implementation in firmware on the ARM side. Please look at 
http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/2177#comment:9 to get the idea what level 
of control does the Linux driver have in this model.

I guess, we can abandon that model and use completely host-implemented 
mesh (with open80211s code), however if we will do so, power management 
goes right out of the window -- kernel should be awake to run this.

-- 
Alex