[OLPC Networking] Testing the Wireless driver changes

Dan Williams dcbw at redhat.com
Sat Jan 19 12:48:06 EST 2008


On Sat, 2008-01-19 at 04:31 +0800, David Woodhouse wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-01-18 at 14:47 -0500, Dan Williams wrote:
> > What is the post-boot firmware flash functionality supposed to apply to,
> > the host-less active antenna? (which is what I heretofore had
> > understood).
> 
> As Ben says, they're the same thing. If you don't load the firmware
> within 5 seconds of the boot2 code starting up, the thing loads its own
> firmware from the internal flash.

Hmm, ok... So all the external USB 8388 dongles have a larger SPI flash
to contain both the Boot2 code and the 100K thick firmware?

Dan

> Yes, it's horrid. It doesn't even preserve the boot2 version, because we
> did some stupid hack to preserve that in the _driver_ rather than
> keeping it internal, so when we send the CMD_802_11_RESET command to
> kick the device back into boot2, we get 'device firmware changed' from
> the kernel and it appears as a completely new device...
> 
> Ideally, we want to just kill the auto-mesh-repeater mode, where boot2
> times out after 5 seconds and loads the firmware from the internal flash
> (which is obviously larger on these devices than on the XO). Can we
> achieve that just by updating to a 'normal' Boot2 version from the XO?
> 
> (Yes, I should be sleeping. No, I have no idea what timezone I'm in).
> 



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