On Mon, 2007-08-27 at 10:01 -0400, John W. Linville wrote: > Just curious, what was the motivation for the new firmware format? > Can the new format be quickly described in high level terms?
There's no fundamental difference between the two formats, the naming is
most of the difference and the new initvals format is merely a
compression of the original format. The new format has a file header
that allows distinguishing versions if we should ever need to upgrade
the format again.
The main motivation for the rename and the incompatible change was
two-fold:
1) nobody but Martin understood the old naming scheme and it was mostly
coincidence that the right values were loaded, no way to easily
bring this over for 802.11 N cards etc. The new naming is closer to
what Broadcom uses internally allowing easier exchange between us
(reverse engineering team) and the driver team.
2) far too many different firmware were supported by the fwcutter which
lead to weird quirks everywhere because Broadcom sometimes slightly
changed the driver/firmware interface without us knowing until bugs
happened, we now only support validated firmware images
> I'm wondering if a tool could easily convert the old firmware format
> to the new, so that we might add it as an upgrade tool for F8.
It is certainly not impossible, you can easily map the old to the new
names and write a script that renames them, adds the header and
compresses the initial values. However, since the old firmware cutter
supported many more firmware images, the converter will need to verify
that the image it finds is one of the (currently two) supported images
and abort otherwise.
Michael has also stated that he is unwilling to support anybody who used
such a tool because the tool could possibly lead to slightly changed
firmware images, I guess he may be convinced otherwise if you can
demonstrate that the converter will only convert files were extracted
from the same file as we now support and generates binary-identical
output to the new fwcutter.
johannes
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part
_______________________________________________ Bcm43xx-dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/bcm43xx-dev
