[COMMENT] CSR WLAN driver in the staging tree

[Greg KH]

On Fri, Feb 15, 2013 at 10:20:55AM -0800, Alex Feinman wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 15, 2013 at 8:02 AM, Greg KH <gregkh at linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> >> >Really?  I thought that these applications were able to be downloaded by
> >> >anyone.  If this isn't the case, then I'm going to have to delete the
> >> >kernel code as it's pretty pointless to be there because no one can
> >> >actually use it :(
> >>
> >> The driver package is available from our tech forum.
> >
> > Do you have direct link to it that we can put in the TODO file in the
> > kernel?
> >
> 
> The tech forum is password protected, so no direct link ATM. In fact
> wasn't it stated earlier in the thread that:
>
> > Unfortunately we are allowed to share user space binaries only for Bluegiga
> > customers who are using our WiFi products. I think the only way to get
> > proprietary user space application is to ask it directly from CSR.

I was hoping otherwise.  If this is true, I'm going to have to delete
the driver as-is, because it really can't be used by anyone.

> In any case, there are larger problems. The driver internally talks to
> the chip e.g. to download the firmware patch. When running against
> UF6026 (a fairly common 2 year old n-wireless core from CSR), it
> complains:
> UniFi f/w protocol major version (8) is different from driver (v9.1).
> Three things about this:
> 1) You'd think the f/w protocol would be at least slightly
> backwards-compatible (sigh).

Agreed.

> 2) The driver probe should check for an unsupported hwids and blacklist them.

True, care to write a patch for this?

> 3) UF60xx series are not really old and yet this driver seems to be
> based on the newer CSR software for UF80xx, so it cannot really be
> called "CSR" driver. Perhaps "CSR8000 driver"?

I just picked the name, CSR, for lack of any other name.  I'll gladly
rename it if needed, but as we don't support the 60xx devices, there's
really no naming conflict here :(

thanks,

greg k-h