coding 88W8388 firmware

[Sascha Silbe]

Excerpts from John Watlington's message of 2012-03-22 03:27:14 +0100:

> We did pay to get a version of firmware developed for both the 8388 and
> the 8686 which offloads the packet processing to the main processor
> (normally much of this is done by the WLAN's processor).   This "thin
> firmware", while consuming more power does allow open source support
> for 802.11s and AP mode as well as open experimentation with mesh
> routing and protocols.  See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Thinfirm_1.5 and
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Libertas_Thinfirmware_HOWTO

It's worth noting that while libertas_tf exists, it has never been
upstreamed and isn't maintained in any way. Fixes to libertas that
apply to libertas_tf as well don't get ported. I'm afraid that except
maybe for a few special cases it isn't very useful in this state.

It's sad to see this useful code rot away. It still requires
proprietary firmware, but at least you can use it for AP mode and
802.11s (not to be confused with the OLPC mesh protocol that was based
on an early draft of 802.11s and isn't interoperable with anything
else). And maybe it's easier to port Thinform to a different operating
system (on the libertas chip) than to port the full-MAC firmware.

I had forward-ported the libertas_tf patch set to Linux 3.1 some time
ago and even ported a few libertas fixes to libertas_tf, but there are
still some issues and I don't have any time left to work on it. If
anyone is interested in picking this up, I can publish the patches.

Sascha

-- 
http://sascha.silbe.org/
http://www.infra-silbe.de/
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