From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Luis R. Rodriguez Date: Mon, 29 Dec 2008 11:47:11 -0800 Subject: [ath9k-devel] ath9k for ar9102 and ar9103, OpenWRT, AP81 router hardware In-Reply-To: References: <20081229160759.GS5944@tesla> <20081229180536.GV5944@tesla> Message-ID: <20081229194711.GX5944@tesla> List-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: ath9k-devel@lists.ath9k.org On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 11:17:41AM -0800, Stephen Gutknecht (hilltx) wrote: > On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 10:05 AM, Luis R. Rodriguez > wrote: > > The MODULE_LICENSE() macro has been incorrectly used before as well, this is > > another example. If you see the header of the file though you will so no GPL > > copyright notices. Trust me, this is not GPL/ISC licensed material and should be > > avoided. > > > > Luis > > > This is very discouraging. I've done my homework in good faith. It > has been like pulling teeth to locate the details required to support > these chips. Plus, I've never worked on a wireless driver before, so > I've been trying to learn the ropes and doing a lot of reading. > > On December 17 you sent me a private email saying: "We don't yet > support SoC stuff, but openwrt guys are enthusiastic to get this going > it seems. Please use the openwrt lists and ask there." Well, I did > ask, and the driver source can't be found, so seems to me I'm the > person to do the work for the community. So I have been trying to > learn what exactly it means to do AHB programming and if this is > nothing more than a device ID issue (there isn't a whole lot out there > on AHB, PCI is far more common). > > I admit I'm new to wireless driver hacking, but it sure seems to me > these chips are very similar to the other Atheros 9000 (9K) chips that > ATH9K driver supports. I'm trying to collaborate with ATH9K project > to test and contribute patches to get these drivers working on these > chips. > > I did my homework before embarking on this venture 2 months ago: > http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Njc1MA > > September 27, 2008 dated story says that the HAL was released for the > "AR9100 WiSoC". Well, it doesn't work on my build of madwifi on > OpenWRT. So I go into this with the goal of tracking down technical > details of why. > > In November, I went out and purchased a few routers based on the > "AR9100 WiSoC" with the intention of getting them to work with > OpenWRT. I never signed any kind of NDA with Atheros, my interest in > this project is as a consumer of routers that I have traced back to a > common platform. The Netgear WNR2000 was publicized as being based on > OpenWRT - and is built on the Atheros platform. Except one major > problem, the GPL download from Netgear doesn't include any source code > for the drivers. And it seems to be some version of ath_ahb driver > that was never released back to the madwifi project. Or maybe I'm > just loading them wrong, as the whole DEVID thing on AHB is still > fuzzy to me (there is no equivalent to lspci on AHB bus that I can > find). The binary only drivers that are in the GPL downloads work > with 2.6.15 kernel, which is nearly three years old (January 3, 2006). > > I can't find the madwifi HAL source code that works on these routers. > So I've tried to make do without bothering you, as your December 17 > email seemed to give me the brush off. I know this is new, and I've > been respectful, but Atheros sure isn't making this job easy. I see > news stories about Atheros releasing a AR9100 WiSoC HAL, but where's > the code? You shouldn't be discouraged because someone posted code and you cannot use it, things like this happen, just move on with what is publicly available under a license which does allow you contribute. When in doubt you can ask. We are engaged enough with the community to be replying to you and contributing to ath9k, and working with the community where possible. What you may have read about "HAL" code being released is the ath9k driver has the hardware access routines necessary to operate the cards. Then we also have released "HAL" code for our legacy chipsets too, you can read more about this here: http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/ath5k#Documentationavailable Instead of doing PCI writes you are going to be using an internal bus for the read/writes. To work on this you need code to work with the MIPS CPUs on the routers. My suggestion to check with openwrt folks comes from the fact that they have some code to support the MIPS boards where these new Atheros 11n card are coming on. What would be left to write is some ahb sort of glue into ath9k to wrap reads/writes and instead of doing PCI reads/writes do the specfific platform device reads/writes. Luis