can't read PDA or update firmware

Jouni Malinen jkmaline at cc.hut.fi
Fri Dec 5 02:11:40 EST 2003


On Thu, Dec 04, 2003 at 10:20:34PM -0800, Andy Lutomirski wrote:

> >>wifi0: trying to read PDA from 0x007f0000: failed
> >>wifi0: trying to read PDA from 0x003f0000: failed
> >>wifi0: trying to read PDA from 0x00390000: failed

> # dd if=$AUXF of=aux-007F0000 bs=1k count=1 skip=8128

Thanks. That sure looked odd.. Have you upgraded the card firmware or
changed PDA before? It looks like 0x007f0000 (and 0x003f0000 probably
giving the same memory area) contains a valid PDA; however, start offset
is off by two bytes.. The first two bytes (zeroes) should not really be
there..

A quick test would be to change pda_addr addresses in the beginning of
prism2_read_pda() in driver/modules/hostap_download.c so that read would
start at 0x7f0002, not 0x7f0000.. This change might be enough to make
the driver able to read the PDA. prism2_srec should also work, because
it just reads PDA from the proc file. You might consider trying a RAM
download first before writing anything to flash, though.

> aux-00390000 looks like a random chunk of physical memory.  Maybe the 
> driver is not reading the card's memory correctly?

Actually, I think it is OK. A random chunk of physical _wlan card_
memory, i.e., TX/RX buffers, but OK. I have to admit that I have never
seen that before, though. Haven't really looked for it either..

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA



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