Loading PRI into cards with serial EEPROM only

Jouni Malinen jkmaline at cc.hut.fi
Thu Oct 23 21:21:43 EDT 2003


On Fri, Oct 24, 2003 at 02:56:47AM +0200, Bjorn Wesen wrote:

> What part of hostap does this "permanent RAM download" ? 

Actually, I apparently called in "persistent" before.. Well, anyway.
Look for local->dl_pri and local->dl_sec. prism2_hw_reset() starts
firmware download if those are set (hostap_hw.c). Similarily, this could
be started directly from the first initialization if the card does not
have PRI f/w. prism2_srec's -p flag enables this mode.

> I assume (dangerous to assume :) that the cards can be identified by the CIS 
> manfid codes. Since there is not much other identification possible at the 
> time of card reset, and the cards need card or at least chip-specific 
> firmware versions, this would probably do.. perhaps the driver can at least 
> mark manfids in a list which are known to be produced without flash, and if 
> the driver fails init for them, it falls back into the RAM download mode.

Prism2 has certainly shown that CIS manfid cannot be trusted. However,
for this kind of list, manfids should be fine. It should not really be a
problem if a non-Prism3 card is flagged as one. They are not supposed to
be used with this driver anyway. One could also try to enable AUX and
verify whether it can be used to write and read SRAM, if more complete
verification is needed.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA



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