Re: AF9035 firmware repository

[Antti Palosaari <crope@iki.fi>]

On 10/17/2012 01:09 PM, Oliver Schinagl wrote:
> On 17-10-12 12:01, Antti Palosaari wrote:
>> Hello Oliver
>>
>> On 10/17/2012 12:20 PM, Oliver Schinagl wrote:
>>> Hey antti, list,
>>>
>>> whilst trying to help some Asus U3100+ users with the recent patches I
>>> ran into an issue. For some strange reason his chip_id was 0xff. I'd
>>> hope this is somehow supplied by the firmware. I think I had the exact
>>> same issue until I used Antti's latest firmware for the AF9035.
>>>
>>> Having said that, I know antti currently hosts the latest firmware for
>>> the af9035, but there seem to be several out in the wild and people
>>> googling for the firmware tend to find the really old one.
>>
>> Yes, it is the firmware. AF9035/AF9033 firmware is aware of used tuner
>> and there is some logic inside firmware for each tuner, like
>> calculating signal strength and handling of tuner I2C bus. Same
>> applies for AF9015/AF9013 too where this has caused some notable
>> problems - I have asked few times if someone could reverse and fix
>> that fw to behave better.
> Ok, then I'll await said test results with latest firmware.
>>
>>> I'm pretty certain that Afa-tech, IT-tech etc won't allow the firmware
>>> to live in the kernel, or simply refuse to answer shuch a plead? They
>>> could be persuaded by the maintainer to at least have it live in
>>> http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git or
>>> if that fails, have it pulled by Documentation/dvb/get_dvb_firmware?
>>> (Btw, why is it get_dvb_firmware? I didn't find a generic script or
>>> other devices that did the same).
>>
>> Feel free to try. I tried it ages back in 2009 but failed.
> i'll doubt anything has changed here :S
>
>>
>> Someone should make some study of these firmwares and list what are
>> differences, supported tuners etc. That was discussed at the time
>> af9035 was merged to the Kernel... As rule of thumb test first newest
>> firmware.
>>
>> Currently there is no 100% automated script to dump those firmwares
>> from the binary. AF9035 driver seems to contain multiple firmwares.
>> Maybe making script that finds and dumps all firmwares found from
>> binary could be handy.
> Maybe as an alternative, also have the firmwares linked/uploaded to
> http://linuxtv.org/downloads/firmware/ ?
>>
>>> I'll update the af9035 wikipage to link to antti's firmware for now.
>>
>> Good!
> and done.
>
> those older firmwares for the af9035 are only there for archive
> purpouse? Or are their known cases where older firmware is needed? At
> this moment, it seems that the oldest one (11.5.9) brakes things.

Mainly for archive. But there could be cases, like some annoying 
behavior, people are willing to test other versions too. That happens 
for example af9015 firmware where the oldest one didn't support firmware 
based remote at all.

When I lastly dumped out few firmwares I found out there was actually 2
firmwares that reports same versions, but are still different:

md5sum dvb-usb-af9035-02.fw_12.5.13.0_6.8.13.0*
817887199bc15dc820b808317d06a2bd  dvb-usb-af9035-02.fw_12.5.13.0_6.8.13.0
f357c0534aba8ced25a5b1a37e19a287 
dvb-usb-af9035-02.fw_12.5.13.0_6.8.13.0_2nd

I didn't looked reason more carefully, but I expect there is some chunk 
which contains different register initialization stuff. Maybe different 
hw layout or diversity or like that.

So there is room for research, but not person to do that heh.

regards
Antti

-- 
http://palosaari.fi/