On 02/05/2014 10:34 PM, grarpamp wrote:
On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 8:50 PM, Larry Finger <larry.fin...@lwfinger.net> wrote:
If you had one of the newer cores, then you needed newer firmware to get the
correct file, but the older ones worked. However, I should never trust my
memory.
Correct my understanding... 'cores' refers to physical hardware
devices/revisions from Broadcom? So if I 'had newer cores', I'd need
to find newer 'firmware aka: microcode' to support them. Because
'older ones aka: firmware files' would not in fact work for me
since they would not have support for the new physical core
I posess? ie: I see newer files from say Linksys have more
ucodeN.fw N'umbers' available inside them than their older files..
The Broadcom devices consist of a number of different individual units with an
interconnect. These units are the cores. The firmware files needed are
determined by the revision number of the 802.11 or PHY core. As Broadcom
develops new versions of the PHY core, the revision numbers get incremented. If
you have a PHY core newer than anything supported by b43, it would not matter if
the firmware for that chip is available or not, b43 would not work. Yes, there
are newer versions of ucodeN, but it does not matter unless someone does the
reverse engineering to see what is needed to make the device work.
The TX and RX headers changed with firmware version 598.314.
598.314 is not now in fwcutter, was it at one time present and
then removed?
No, someone noticed that the descriptors changed with that version. We either
never found a file containing that version, or a newer revision was found first.
change in the driver was introduced with commit 17030f4 in such a way that
the older firmware versions still worked.
The two commits are at the bottom of the page
https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/log/drivers/net/wireless/b43?ofs=200.
Looking them over.
Ah, I know it by a different number.
What number is that?
6.30.163.46
How does something like '6.30.102.9 (r366174)' on the wrapper
relate to its corresponding internal '784.2'? What are those
strings each describing?
There is no one to one relationship. Both are internal Broadcom designations.
And is there a supposed changelog, perhaps but
not necessarily from Broadcom, for what changed
in the different firmwares that we find?
No. The firmware is just a black box.
Larry
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