Re: ipw2100: firmware problem

Simon Kelley
2005-06-21T08:22:31Z

Jirka Bohac wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 08, 2005 at 05:44:20PM +0300, Denis Vlasenko wrote:
>
>>On Wednesday 08 June 2005 17:23, Pavel Machek wrote:
>>
>>>What's the prefered way to solve this one? Only load firmware when
>>>user does ifconfig eth1 up? [It is wifi, it looks like it would be
>>>better to start firmware sooner so that it can associate to the
>>>AP...].
>>
>>Do you want to associate to an AP when your kernel boots,
>>_before_ any iwconfig had a chance to configure anything?
>>That's strange.
>>
>>My position is that wifi drivers must start up in an "OFF" mode.
>>Do not send anything. Do not join APs or start IBSS.
>
>
> Agreed.
>
>
>>Thus, no need to load fw in early boot.
>
>
> I don't think this is true. Loading the firmware on the first
> "ifconfig up" is problematic. Often, people want to rename the
> device from ethX/wlanX/... to something stable. This is usually
> based on the adapter's MAC address, which is not visible until
> the firmware is loaded.
>
> Prism54 does it this way and it really sucks. You need to bring
> the adapter up to load the firmware, then bring it back down,
> rename it, and bring it up again.
>

The atmel driver includes a small firmware stub which does nothing but
determine the MAC address, to solve this problem. This is compiled into
the driver and so doesn't depend on request_firmware(). The stub was
created by reverse engineering the card and is GPL, so there's no
problem including it in the kernel.

This is not a general solution, since it depends on the ability to
create such MAC reader firmware, but it might be a possibility in this case.

Cheers,

Simon.