Wireless Linux(802.11) for Embedded PowerPC

Wireless Linux(802.11) for Embedded PowerPC

[wei.li4]

Hi All,

Where is the best access point for this topic? Did anyone work on this 
with MPC8xx? Thanks.

Wei

RE: Wireless Linux(802.11) for Embedded PowerPC

[Chun Chung Lo]

Hi,

I have also done a such project last year. I used a MPC860SR processor
card, plus an extra tailor-made carrier board (just extend the PCMCIA
interface from the processor card). The design is simple, I just
followed the reference design suggested by Freescale MPC860 user manual.
You can get this manual on Freescale's website.

Then I used a Intersil Prism2 compatible PCMCIA WLAN card (may be a
Compact Flash WLAN card is also OK, but I have never tried this) and
plug into the PCMCIA socket of the carrier board.=0D

In the whole project, I used ELDK 3.0 as my software development
platform (U-Boot, Linux, binutils... etc). And I used linux-wlan as the
WLAN card driver.=0D

But one more thing is I have built 2 of such systems and only tried the
normal WLAN functions (infrastructure, ad-hoc mode) but never AP mode
since the driver and my WLAN card does not support.

Here are some references:

1. WLAN card driver: linux-wlan -- http://www.linux-wlan.org/
2. Freescale MPC860 User Manual: --
http://www.freescale.com/files/netcomm/doc/ref_manual/MPC860UM.pdf

Thanks for your attention.

Best regards,
Lo Chun Chung

-----Original Message-----
From: linuxppc-embedded-bounces+cclo=3Dastri.org@ozlabs.org
[mailto:linuxppc-embedded-bounces+cclo=3Dastri.org@ozlabs.org] On Behalf
Of wei.li4@elf.mcgill.ca
Sent: Wednesday, 06 September, 2006 4:04 AM
To: linuxppc-embedded@ozlabs.org
Subject: Wireless Linux(802.11) for Embedded PowerPC


Hi All,

Where is the best access point for this topic? Did anyone work on this=0D
with MPC8xx? Thanks.

Wei
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Re: Wireless Linux(802.11) for Embedded PowerPC

[John W. Linville]

On Tue, Sep 05, 2006 at 04:03:55PM -0400, wei.li4@elf.mcgill.ca wrote:

> Where is the best access point for this topic? Did anyone work on this 
> with MPC8xx? Thanks.

Probably netdev@vger.kernel.org.  Is there anything about your wireless
needs that is specific to embedded work?

John
-- 
John W. Linville
linville@tuxdriver.com

Re: Wireless Linux(802.11) for Embedded PowerPC

[John W. Linville]

On Wed, Sep 06, 2006 at 09:30:00AM +0800, Chun Chung Lo wrote:

> 1. WLAN card driver: linux-wlan -- http://www.linux-wlan.org/

Is this project even still active?  The last update to the page was
2.5 years ago (2/2004), and many of the links are broken...

Do the prism drivers in the upstream kernel not work for you?

John
-- 
John W. Linville
linville@tuxdriver.com

RE: Wireless Linux(802.11) for Embedded PowerPC

[Chun Chung Lo]

Hi,

This project is my university graduation project, so it is now stopped.
(I just finished some ugly prototypes :)

As I said before, I used ELDK for my project (since I am a student at
that moment, I really do not know how to manually build/compile a GNU
cross-platform toolchains), there is no WLAN drivers bundled inside the
toolkit. Also my WLAN card is based on Intersil Prism 2 chipset, so my
only choice is linux-wlan package. I do not know the project status, but
the driver stability seems OK for me. (No crash occurred during I do so
many ugly tests :)

But the performance and the compatibilty is quite good (provided that
the PCMCIA socket drirver is working properly) for a such small system
(MPC860 @ 50MHz).

Also I cannot see any drivers existing in the upstream kernel are really
support the "Intersil Prism 2 WLAN" cards (my card is differ from those
Orinoco cards and Hermes cards, also the drivers are also differ a lot).


If you are going to use Intersil Prism 2 cards/chips, I would suggest
you to use the linux-wlan driver (but seems this driver does not support
AP mode yet...)

Thanks.

Best regards,
Lo Chun Chung

-----Original Message-----
From: John W. Linville [mailto:linville@tuxdriver.com]=0D
Sent: Wednesday, 06 September, 2006 9:58 PM
To: Chun Chung Lo
Cc: wei.li4@elf.mcgill.ca; linuxppc-embedded@ozlabs.org
Subject: Re: Wireless Linux(802.11) for Embedded PowerPC


On Wed, Sep 06, 2006 at 09:30:00AM +0800, Chun Chung Lo wrote:

> 1. WLAN card driver: linux-wlan -- http://www.linux-wlan.org/

Is this project even still active?  The last update to the page was 2.5
years ago (2/2004), and many of the links are broken...

Do the prism drivers in the upstream kernel not work for you?

John
--=0D
John W. Linville
linville@tuxdriver.com

This message (including any attachments) is for the named addressee(s)'s=
 use only. It may contain
sensitive, confidential, private proprietary or legally privileged=
 information intended for a
specific individual and purpose, and is protected by law. If you are not=
 the intended recipient,
please immediately delete it and all copies of it from your system, destroy=
 any hard copies of it
and notify the sender. Any use, disclosure, copying, or distribution of=
 this message and/or any
attachments is strictly prohibited.

Re: Wireless Linux(802.11) for Embedded PowerPC

[John W. Linville]

On Thu, Sep 07, 2006 at 09:23:08AM +0800, Chun Chung Lo wrote:

> Also I cannot see any drivers existing in the upstream kernel are really
> support the "Intersil Prism 2 WLAN" cards (my card is differ from those
> Orinoco cards and Hermes cards, also the drivers are also differ a lot).

I think you may be mistaken.  The orinoco drivers in the upstream
kernel seem to support all the same device IDs as are supported
in the linux-wlan code.  If your card is missing, it is likely a
simple matter of a missing device ID.  But, major code changes are
probably not necessary.  (USB-based devices may be an exception....see
http://www.nongnu.org/orinoco/ for experimental support.)
 
> If you are going to use Intersil Prism 2 cards/chips, I would suggest
> you to use the linux-wlan driver (but seems this driver does not support
> AP mode yet...)

Please don't encourage people to patronize dead projects when the
upstream kernel should work for them.

Thanks,

John
-- 
John W. Linville
linville@tuxdriver.com