[WIP] Haiku should include support for wimax devices

[kallisti5]

Haiku should include at least one wimax hardware driver, thus making the building of a Wimax stack possible someday.

[kallisti5]

progress atm

[kallisti5]

Progress so far:

• based on other known stable usb driver framework
• properly detects new usb device and begins to set it up
• detects the firmware in /boot/system/data/firmware/macxvi200/macxvi200.bin
• attempts to push the firmware to the usb device (not working atm but almost there)
• as it is not complete yet, it safely stops before causing stability issues
• unloads cleanly if USB device is unplugged

[kallisti5]

sources at ​http://github.com/kallisti5/usb_beceemwmx

Progress so far:

• vendor configuration is pushed (with error checking) to device
• firmware is pushed (with error checking) to device
• stable!

TODO:

• implement calls to read nvram (FLASH or EEPROM)

[kallisti5]

as of Oct 8th, 2010

[kallisti5]

Progress so far:

• Device baseband chip detected
• Binary vendor configuration loaded into struct for access
• Flash or EEPROM non-volatile memory detected (verified)
• Non-volatile memory initialized (verified)
• DDR memory initialized (verified)
• vendor config pushed to device
• firmware pushed to device
• Device CPU booted
• MAC address read from non-volatile memory (verified)
• When device is allowed to complete initialization...
  • a new network interface shows up with the correct MAC address
  • any bytes sent to the interface result in a "WiMAX connection not up" warning
  • removal of usb device causes a crash (looking into it)

TODO:

• Get device LED's working via GPIO
• Implement generic WiMAX interface in driver / control application
• lots

[kallisti5]

Progress so far:

• Device baseband chip detected (verified)
• Generic support for a wide range of Beceem devices (due to generic vendor config)
  • Future support of non-USB Beceem devices possible
• Binary vendor configuration loaded into struct for access (verified)
• Flash or EEPROM non-volatile memory detected (verified)
• Non-volatile memory initialized (verified)
• DDR memory initialized (verified)
• vendor config pushed to device (verified)
• firmware pushed to device (verified)
• Device CPU boots (verified)
• MAC address read from non-volatile memory (verified)
• GPIO registers probed and device LEDs set up based on vendor config (verified)
• We know what GPIO LEDs do what based on the vendor config (verified)
• GPIO LEDs can be illuminated easily. (verified)
• A LED control kernel thread is spawned. (not operational atm)
• When device is allowed to complete initialization...
  • a new network interface shows up with the correct MAC address
  • any bytes sent to the interface result in a "WiMAX connection not up" warning
• When the device is removed
  • LED kernel thread is safely terminated
  • mallocs are safely freed

[kallisti5]

great progress :)

[phoudoin]

Since hrev39581, link speed should be reported in bits/s unit, not anymore kbits/s. And I dunno much about WiMax, but I guess WiMax usual speed is not 1000 bits/s ;-)

[kallisti5]

my initial work was checked in hrev40302

TODO

• physical network interface needs work as well as io control calls.
• contact Beceem / Broadcom and see if they will dual license code as MIT+GPL, or get their blessing for us to license my code as MIT. (there isn't a lot of original Beceem code left.. but there is possibly a little.. especially in the BeceemDDR code)

Done:

• Beceem binary firmware file push
• low level hardware setup and communication
• GPIO mapping and a basic LED Thread that monitors device state
• LED blinks and stuff according to device state
• reads device mac address and sets up (buggy) network interface with it.
• more stable then vendors driver!

[kallisti5]

going to close this for now.. given the decline in WiMax presence in the US and abroad, as well as the tendency for new WiMax devices to show up as generic ndis devices it seems like more trouble then it's worth.

I'll leave the Beceem wimax driver in-tree for now. However it should definitely not be in the default build.