OpenBSD Journal

Developer Blog - mglocker@: New WLAN drivers on the upswing

Contributed by jolan on from the 802.11a/b/gangsters dept.

We started with the malo(4) device driver development at about the 7th October 2006 using two Netgear WG511v2 cardbus devices. The driver supports the Marvel Libertas 88W8335 MAC chip plus the Marvel Libertas 88W8030 RF transceiver chip. The RF transceiver is accessed via firmware commands and so other RF chip may work if the correct firmware is used. The device name malo stands for Malo Libertas Open, and is allusion to the term Libertas, which means freedom in Spanish. Indeed the whole documentation handling is not such a freedom (how so often) for OpenSource development. Now guess what malo means in Spanish ...

So, we have no hardware documentation at hand but we have at least an already existing Linux driver, which we use as a kind of documentation. Writing the cardbus attachment code was a matter of minutes as the interface is standardized and a nice API exists. But then the pain started, to get a first bleep out of the card we had to get the firmware load work. In fact there are two firmwares; a boot firmware and the real firmware. To get the firmware microcode, we had to extract it out of the Windows driver which came on the bought cardbus device CD-ROM. Marvell does not offer a download on their homepage. Getting the firmware load working correctly was a bit tricky -- actually it was tremendously painful so we organized a cheese fondue micro hackathon at Marc Balmer's place in Basel to get that task achieved. After that weekend we were able to load the firmware, and the first interrupts were received. Now the DMA ring handling code was ripped out from a similar driver and modified till it fit into malo(4) and the receive path was almost working. Because of the lack of usable information figuring out what flags do and how to initialise the DMA engine was an endless trial and error loop. The next task was getting the frames handling done, because the device needs some kind of extra header fields in a frame to handle it. We spent over a week to find out how this is done correctly. Now it was time to get the scanning code up and running and that was the moment when the command interface had to be rewritten -- actually the existing stubs were an incredible hack the misteriously worked. After some more riddling and a couple of tries the firmware command interface operated in a reasonable way. So after testing 300+ kernels some with nasty bugs and panics the card started working -- it would have been a lot easier with real documentation.

At the current state the driver is able to associate with a none encrypted AP and handle network communcation at a fixed rate. Currently just the infrastructure mode works, but more or less reliable. We are looking forward to get the rate control and more stuff (WEP etc.) done as next.

Also recently added has been the PCI support, which were tested by one of our users as we don't have own PCI devices now. If you want to help us doing further progress for this driver we would be glad if you could:

        Donate PCI malo devices.  One known model would be the Netgear WG311v3.
        Asus is another manufacturer that produces malo(4) based cards.
        Please contact claudio@ or mglocker@ therefore.

        Test the current driver on other architectures than i386, like amd64,
        macppc (big endian) etc.
Also good progress has been done for the zyd(4) device driver by Damien Bergamini and Florian Stoehr, which supports the ZyDAS ZD1211 USB chip. Refering to a recent commit message:
        add support for 4 new radios: AL2210, CGT, Maxim New, Maxim New2
        untested because of lack of hardware. if you have a ZD1211 adapter
        with one of these radios, please drop us a mail.
Please test, test, test and report to damien@ or ich@florian-stoehr.de. Also, if you want to donate devices containing those radio types, or the yet not supported ZD1211B devices, please get in touch with them.

Thanks,
mglocker@ & claudio@

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By Marc Balmer (213.189.137.178) on

    If a cheese fondue is all that is needed to keep you going, you are always welcome to be my guests... ;)

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (149.169.135.33) on

      > If a cheese fondue is all that is needed to keep you going, you are always welcome to be my guests... ;)

      Sounds like a way to get sponsership, from cheese markers, fondue encouragers, or just random people from the internet who want more progress on their wireless drivers.

      "Hey, I need a good driver for my wireless card, time to buy some cheese and ship it off to balmer!"

      Comments
      1. By Anonymous Coward (216.175.250.42) on

        > > If a cheese fondue is all that is needed to keep you going, you are always welcome to be my guests... ;)
        >
        > Sounds like a way to get sponsership, from cheese markers, fondue encouragers, or just random people from the internet who want more progress on their wireless drivers.
        >
        > "Hey, I need a good driver for my wireless card, time to buy some cheese and ship it off to balmer!"

        And does this mean that there are two warring camps of OpenBSD developers? Will the Cheese conquer the Beer? Only time will tell...

        Comments
        1. By Anonymous Coward (62.252.32.12) on

          > And does this mean that there are two warring camps of OpenBSD developers? Will the Cheese conquer the Beer? Only time will tell...

          Cheese and beer mix rather well. Especially gouda and duvel :)

          Comments
          1. By Anonymous Coward (216.175.250.42) on

            > > And does this mean that there are two warring camps of OpenBSD developers? Will the Cheese conquer the Beer? Only time will tell...
            >
            > Cheese and beer mix rather well. Especially gouda and duvel :)

            My god, man, you're right...

            An entire culinary paradigm is now open to me...

            Comments
            1. By ahafey (82.69.184.245) on

              > > > And does this mean that there are two warring camps of OpenBSD developers? Will the Cheese conquer the Beer? Only time will tell...
              > >
              > > Cheese and beer mix rather well. Especially gouda and duvel :)
              >
              > My god, man, you're right...
              >
              > An entire culinary paradigm is now open to me...

              I fear for the developers :-P

              "OpenBSD used to be a very active project... For some reason development slowed then stopped after a change in the project policy W.R.T food and drink"

              Although looking at the photos of the various events, that most of you survived based on the repeat performances I see, means you must be made of stern stuff!!!

          2. By Jean (80.238.130.187) on

            After some difficulties - including Bobelix passing out from the alcohol in a fondue (he has a very low tolerance for alcohol) - the two Gauls manage to secure an edelweiss and return to the village. (quote from the famous Pufferix in Switzerland )

        2. By Miod Vallat (80.65.224.82) miod@ on

          > And does this mean that there are two warring camps of OpenBSD developers? Will the Cheese conquer the Beer? Only time will tell...

          What do you mean? Cheese has always been more important than beer. Of course, not enough people are fine cheese connoisseurs, even outside of the OpenBSD group. I'm doing my best to educate them, but I wouldn't mind some help.

          Comments
          1. By Anonymous Coward (213.189.137.178) on

            > > And does this mean that there are two warring camps of OpenBSD developers? Will the Cheese conquer the Beer? Only time will tell...
            >
            > What do you mean? Cheese has always been more important than beer. Of course, not enough people are fine cheese connoisseurs, even outside of the OpenBSD group. I'm doing my best to educate them, but I wouldn't mind some help.
            >

            ... and when you had enough of the french taste, you are invited to my place to taste some real nice (swiss of course) cheese. we make the best hard cheese and of course the vacherin mont d'or which even outperforms camambert, fram d'ambert, bleue de-quoit'il'sagit etc.

            Comments
            1. By Miod Vallat (80.65.224.82) miod@ on

              > ... and when you had enough of the french taste, you are invited to my place to taste some real nice (swiss of course) cheese. we make the best hard cheese and of course the vacherin mont d'or which even outperforms camambert, fram d'ambert, bleue de-quoit'il'sagit etc.

              Tsk, tsk, Marc.

              Know thy enemy: at least know how to spell foreign cheese names correctly.

          2. By Jasper Lievisse Adriaanse (80.60.145.215) jasper@openbsd.org on http://humppa.nl

            Don't mention Dutch cheese to Miod..

            Comments
            1. By Miod Vallat (80.65.224.82) miod@ on

              > Don't mention Dutch cheese to Miod..

              You sure mean Dutch plastic, don't you? (-:

              You don't want me to admit I am especially fond of Edam on a public forum!

            2. By Anonymous Coward (87.78.92.197) on

              Old Amsterdam for the win.

          3. By wob (12.109.229.8) wob@bonch.org on

            > > And does this mean that there are two warring camps of OpenBSD developers? Will the Cheese conquer the Beer? Only time will tell...
            >
            > What do you mean? Cheese has always been more important than beer. Of course, not enough people are fine cheese connoisseurs, even outside of the OpenBSD group. I'm doing my best to educate them, but I wouldn't mind some help.
            >

            And what is wrong with having both beer AND cheese at the same time?
            I should hope nothing! Seems like a perfect combination to me! :)



    2. By ahafey (82.69.184.245) on

      > If a cheese fondue is all that is needed to keep you going, you are always welcome to be my guests... ;)

      Apologies, clicked mod down instead of mod up :-(

  2. By Cheesy (208.191.177.19) on

    I'll be looking for the "ifconfig -fondue" option in 4.1, which will increase a wireless card's RF power to the point where it melts nearby cheese....

  3. By Anonymous Coward (85.50.128.155) on

    "Libertas" means freedom in latin. A very old form of Spanish, if you want. In "modern" Spanish it's "libertad". :-)

  4. By Nate (74.13.30.206) on

    Why malo though? Most drivers use two or three letters to identify themselves, would not the french mal work just as well and fit more with the pattern?

    Comments
    1. By Jasper (82.94.1.57) jasper@ on

      > Why malo though? Most drivers use two or three letters to identify themselves, would not the french mal work just as well and fit more with the pattern?

      Wasn't this discussed on icb in length?

    2. By Anonymous Coward (69.207.171.114) on

      > Why malo though? Most drivers use two or three letters to identify themselves, would not the french mal work just as well and fit more with the pattern?

      "Mal" is actually a Spanish word too. It means "badly" as an adverb or "evil" as a noun. "Malo" is the adjective "bad" (although it is also used as a noun: bad thing, bad guy, bad one, etc.)

Latest Articles

Credits

Copyright © - Daniel Hartmeier. All rights reserved. Articles and comments are copyright their respective authors, submission implies license to publish on this web site. Contents of the archive prior to as well as images and HTML templates were copied from the fabulous original deadly.org with Jose's and Jim's kind permission. This journal runs as CGI with httpd(8) on OpenBSD, the source code is BSD licensed. undeadly \Un*dead"ly\, a. Not subject to death; immortal. [Obs.]