Re: Marvell 88w8385 Support

[Dan Williams <dcbw@redhat.com>]

On Wed, 2009-01-14 at 19:35 +0100, tsr wrote:
> John Daiker wrote:
> > On 01/14/2009 08:47 AM, Dan Williams wrote:
> >> On Tue, 2009-01-13 at 09:52 -0500, John W. Linville wrote:
> >>   
> >>> On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 01:09:12PM +0100, tsr wrote:
> >>>     
> >>>> Hi,
> >>>>
> >>>> I have a FSG-3 that includes a Marvell 88w8385 card. I wonder if there
> >>>> is support for it in recent kernels. According to
> >>>> http://marc.info/?l=linux-wireless&m=123178916308198&w=2 (search for
> >>>> 8385) there seems to be support but I don't want to start messing 
> >>>> around
> >>>> with kernels and stuff without being sure.
> >>>>        
> >>> That driver is for SDIO hardware.  It looks like your FSG-3 has
> >>> mini-PCI?  Either way, we don't have a driver merged yet that would
> >>> cover your hardware.
> >>>      
> >>
> >> Looks like it's a CB35, which is actually an 88w8335 MiniPCI card.
> >> Would be supported by the mwl8k driver ideally.  I've started on trying
> >> to add support to mwl8k for the 8335 parts, but we'll need to split the
> >> driver so that we can create IO hooks for the different parts.  It'll be
> >> a bit, but we'll get there.
> >>
> >> Dan
> >>    
> > Very interested in the progress of 8335 support at some point.  My 
> > Netgear wg311v3 is sitting on my desk... waiting for some Linux bits to 
> > get it running!
> > 
> > I can assist in testing whenever bits become available ( officially or 
> > unofficially, hint, hint! :-P )
> > 
> > Thanks for the hard work, and keep them bits a comin'
> > 
> > JD
> > 
> 
> Thanks for the info, I've found something that is said to be a working 
> drivers for 'my' card in this package: 
> http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/maxtor/en_us/downloads/MSSII_3.1.2.src.tgz
> 
> The kernel source says it's some kind of 2.6 kernel, grepping for it I 
> found the highest number to be 2.6.14 so maybe it is possible to use 
> something from it.
> 
> AFAIK it's also GPL.

Wow, that is the right driver...  haven't seen a driver for the 8335
before, but there it is, and it's GPL too.  Got the firmware too, which
I also haven't seen separately.

The path forward with this is to port the support for the hardware over
to mwl8k since the firmware interface is almost the same.

That said, the only reason I chose that as the path forward was that we
couldn't make any progress with the standalone driver, and figured that
Marvell's driver would actually work where mrv8k didn't.  I still think
it makes sense to use the same driver core for both but if that turns
out to be too hard, we can just do a mac80211 port for this.

Dan