Wl12xx on Insignificant Bits

Android rebuilt

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 15:27:15 +0000

While stuck inside for days due to snow, I once again downloaded the Android source trees from the repos. I plan to update my Android wifi page with better, step-by-step instructions to go from nothing to a working set of wireless utilities on the phone. In the meantime, I’ve re-familiarized myself with the current Android build environment (for various values of current – this uses donut since as far as I know, eclair doesn’t have a definition for the Dream (G1/ADP1) phone yet).

wl1251 performance

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 03:18:46 +0000

After fixing the remaining ifup bug (as expected, it was easy), I have some initial numbers on the new kernel driver versus the stock vendor driver on the G1: driveravg ping msnetperf mbit/stiwlan65.2317.53wl12518.5653.82 So, better on latency, worse on throughput. wl1251 is also quite a lot larger when taking all of cfg80211/mac80211 into account, though I didn’t spend any time trying to tweak the size in the build. Well, at least the code doesn’t make you want to poke your own eyes out.

Hang fixed

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 18:04:06 +0000

These sorts of bugs can ruin your weekend, just ask Ange who had to listen to me mope yesterday. Of course, I spotted it right away when looking at it freshly during this morning’s commute. Now, ifconfig wlan0 up; ifconfig wlan0 down; ifconfig wlan0 up still fails with wl1251, but it doesn’t hang and the rest looks tractable.

wl1251_sdio merged

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 03:27:23 +0000

The SDIO patches for TI 1251 (Android wifi chipset) are finally merged into wireless-testing, so they should be a lot easier to hack on now. That means the driver should make it into 2.6.32, though at a rather experimental stage. I did fix some crashes on ifup/ifdown since last posting, but there’s always more work to do. Current todo list includes better behavior for non-polling controllers (make the irq have a top-half), tracking down a device hang on reinitialization, pushing the msm_wifi.ko module, and on and on.

Now bionic

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 19:12:18 +0000

Kalle has posted a rebased version of my SDIO patches on top of the latest wireless-testing. I’ve done a little bit of testing with it – the driver starts up and loads fine, but once the interface goes down, it’s busted:

<6>[  980.884302] wl1251_sdio mmc0:0001:1: firmware: requesting wl1251-fw.bin
<6>[  981.036448] wl1251_sdio mmc0:0001:1: firmware: requesting wl1251-nvs.bin
<3>[  981.045449] init: untracked pid 354 exited
<3>[  981.074408] init: untracked pid 355 exited
<7>[  981.331853] wl1251: 151 tx blocks at 0x3b788, 35 rx blocks at 0x3a780
<7>[  981.339300] wl1251: firmware booted (Rev 4.0.4.3.5)
<7>[  984.702740] wlan0: direct probe to AP 00:1a:70:da:a9:cd (try 1)
<7>[  984.901621] wlan0: direct probe to AP 00:1a:70:da:a9:cd (try 2)
<7>[  985.101583] wlan0: direct probe to AP 00:1a:70:da:a9:cd (try 3)
<7>[  985.301617] wlan0: direct probe to AP 00:1a:70:da:a9:cd timed out
<7>[ 1024.802837] wl1251: down
<3>[ 1044.856640] init: untracked pid 358 exited
<3>[ 1050.033886] mmc0: Data timeout
<3>[ 1050.037701] wl1251: ERROR sdio write failed (-110)
<3>[ 1051.045674] mmc0: Data timeout
<3>[ 1051.049519] wl1251: ERROR sdio write failed (-110)
<3>[ 1052.057673] mmc0: Data timeout
<3>[ 1052.061518] wl1251: ERROR sdio write failed (-110)

Exploring this further turned into a rather long yak shaving session because I wanted to get iw on the phone to do more manual tests, and I wanted to link it dynamically against bionic, the Android’s fork of a BSD libc. Here were a few interesting discoveries found along the way:

Wifi UI Part 0

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 04:13:13 +0000

Work on the Android wireless driver is stalled for now as kvalo is rebasing the patches. I believe the next step will be to take the platform code, which I have temporarily built into a module called msm_wifiÂ¸ and turn it into a platform rfkill device. Or something like that – this is what he and I came up with at the wireless summit. Then there’s an annoying stack trace because free_irq() happens in common code, but sdio irqs are somewhat different so that needs to be pushed down into the interface layer.

wl12xx howto

Sun, 31 May 2009 00:03:55 +0000

So, wl12xx definitely works including transmission, but I still haven’t fixed the rough edges in the driver. However, I did bother to make a semi-permanent writeup on how to build and use wl12xx on the G1 as it currently stands. I hope to clean up the warts and submit the patchset next week. Meanwhile, I have a lot of ath5k bugs to work on. Enough for today though.

First scan

Thu, 21 May 2009 19:36:00 +0000

Success! Scanning with wl12xx on my ADP1 works. I’ll post more later but here’s a teaser. That’s a real SSID, however apt.

# ./iwlist wlan0 scan
wlan0     Scan completed :
          Cell 01 - Address: 00:0F:B5:63:30:4E
                    Channel:11
                    Frequency:2.462 GHz (Channel 11)
                    Quality=14/70  Signal level=-96 dBm
                    Encryption key:on
                    ESSID:"SERENDIPITY"
                    Bit Rates:1 Mb/s; 2 Mb/s; 5.5 Mb/s; 11 Mb/s; 18 Mb/s
                              24 Mb/s; 36 Mb/s; 54 Mb/s
                    Bit Rates:6 Mb/s; 9 Mb/s; 12 Mb/s; 48 Mb/s
                    Mode:Master
                    Extra:tsf=000001dec907e41c
                    Extra: Last beacon: 160ms ago
                    (Unknown Wireless Token 0x8C05)

wl12xx update

Sat, 16 May 2009 21:42:54 +0000

I won’t claim success until I actually transfer data, but so far, it looks like wl12xx SDIO support is baked:

[  111.247063] cfg80211: Using static regulatory domain info
[  111.253472] cfg80211: Regulatory domain: US
[  111.262810] 	(start_freq - end_freq @ bandwidth), (max_antenna_gain, max_eirp)
[  111.271568] 	(2402000 KHz - 2472000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (600 mBi, 2700 mBm)
[  111.279472] 	(5170000 KHz - 5190000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (600 mBi, 2300 mBm)
[  111.287254] 	(5190000 KHz - 5210000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (600 mBi, 2300 mBm)
[  111.294975] 	(5210000 KHz - 5230000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (600 mBi, 2300 mBm)
[  111.302482] 	(5230000 KHz - 5330000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (600 mBi, 2300 mBm)
[  111.310264] 	(5735000 KHz - 5835000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (600 mBi, 3000 mBm)
[  111.317894] cfg80211: Calling CRDA for country: US
[  112.684807] lib80211: common routines for IEEE802.11 drivers
[  112.690972] lib80211_crypt: registered algorithm 'NULL'
[  112.744713] lib80211_crypt: registered algorithm 'TKIP'
[  112.787467] lib80211_crypt: registered algorithm 'WEP'
[  112.845267] lib80211_crypt: registered algorithm 'CCMP'
[  113.251671] wl12xx: registering driver
[  113.256462] wifi_probe
[  113.259208] trout_wifi_power: 1
[  113.569452] trout_wifi_reset: 0
[  113.623681] trout_wifi_set_carddetect: 1
[  113.628290] mmc0: card_present 1
[  113.631921] mmc0: Slot status change detected (0 -> 1)
[  113.653283] mmc0: Command timeout
[  113.664788] mmc0: card claims to support voltages below the defined range. These will be ignored.
[  113.678429] mmc0: SDIO card claims to support the incompletely defined 'low voltage range'. This will be ignored.
[  113.692773] mmc0: new SDIO card at address 0001
[  113.702813] wl12xx: in probe
[  113.728844] phy0: Selected rate control algorithm 'minstrel'
[  113.738915] wl12xx: loaded
[  113.743919] wl12xx: initialized

Unfortunately, I can’t really test it yet because the wpa_supplicant already on the phone doesn’t support -Dwext or -Dnl80211, and there are no wireless-tools. So I need to cross-compile those before attempting to associate. In the meantime, here’s a very rough patch that implements the goods from wireless-testing wl12xx. I need to work on read() and write() - right now they are a copy of what is in the google driver because it appears the host driver has issues with RW_EXTENDED. I don’t believe the readb/writeb fallbacks should be strictly necessary. Ditto with the platform code, that needs a slightly better solution.

wl12xx merged

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 22:25:27 +0000

commit 00d8979d598d5461a06d800c779f15e03888d9d8
Author: Kalle Valo
Date:   Wed Apr 29 23:33:31 2009 +0300

    wl12xx: add driver

    wl12xx is a driver for TI wl1251 802.11 chipset designed for embedded
    devices, supporting both SDIO and SPI busses. Currently the driver
    supports only SPI. Adding support 1253 (the 5 GHz version) should be
    relatively easy. More information here:

    http://focus.ti.com/general/docs/wtbu/wtbuproductcontent.tsp?contentId=4711

    (Collapsed original sequence of pre-merge patches into single commit for
    initial merge. -- JWL)

    Signed-off-by: Kalle Valo
    Signed-off-by: Bob Copeland
    Signed-off-by: John W. Linville

Hooray, wl12xx is now in wireless-testing! As the commit log states, SDIO support isn’t there yet, because I haven’t written it yet. Well, I wrote some of it, but nothing worth even compile-testing yet.