[Testing] Wireless test results

Mitch Bradley wmb at laptop.org
Mon Feb 16 20:03:19 EST 2009


James Cameron wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 11:21:34AM -1000, Mitch Bradley wrote:
>   
>> The OS is supposed to reload the wireless firmware so the firmware that  
>> is in OFW shouldn't affect the OS behavior.
>>     
>
> Agreed.  It shouldn't.  I wonder if it does, through some mechanism we
> don't know yet.  Has anyone else got the recent OS build to operate fine
> on WPA with an older version of OFW?
>
>   
One could try adding "wlan-reset" to /boot/olpc.fth, thus ensuring that 
the wireless module
is not "carrying over" any state from the firmware.

In the normal case of booting from NAND (or USB or SD), OFW doesn't even 
turn on the wireless module.  This is easy to confirm - just observe 
that the wireless led doesn't turn on until well into the OS startup.  
I'm quite sure that the OS wireless code doesn't extract the wireless 
firmware image from OFW - it could in theory do so, but I'm sure that it 
doesn't - it gets it from the filesystem.



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