[linuxkernelnewbies] OpenFWWF - Open FirmWare for WiFi networks

[Peter Teoh]

http://www.ing.unibs.it/openfwwf/ Welcome! OpenFWWF, Open FirmWare for WiFi networks, is a project that wants to provide an easy and inexpensive platform to implement new Medium Access Control (MAC) mechanism, and wants to be a valid alternative to simulations and expensive ad-hoc platforms. The combination of OpenFWWF and b43 driver is a complete and cheap tool that makes testing of new MAC easy achievable. This site provides an open source firmware for Broadcom/AirForce chipset based devices. Currently this firmware has been tested on 4306 and 4318 chipset revisions and with kernel 2.6.27-rc5 (module b43 from wireless-testing). Firmware has been developed starting from specifications in http://bcm-v4.sipsolutions.net: we report here some information more we discovered, such as important interactions between the MAC processor, the hardware registers and the operating mechanisms that rules data frames along the transmission and reception paths. This project has been successfully completed thanks to the work of reverse engineering available at http://bcm-v4.sipsolutions.net and to the tools that Michael Buesch makes available to the community. What this firmware supports: works in infrastructured mode as both station and AP, the latter requires hostapd it is compliant with DCF access scheme in b and g modes, not tested in a bands What this firmware does not support: does not implement RTS/CTS handshake procedure, must be disabled on module load does not work with hardware cryptography acceleration, use without encryption! does not work with dot11 QoS, must be disabled on module load You can download the firmware source code here. Tools for compilation (b43-tools) can be found here. You can download last snapshot from the site or use git: git clone http://git.bu3sch.de/git/b43-tools.git How to use the downloaded firmware To obtain an executable firmware, once you have installed b43-tools, you need to type 'make' from the firmware folder. To make the firmware work properly you need at least 2 more files that must be extracted from original Broadcom drivers: b0g0bsinitvals5.fw and b0g0initvals5.fw. To obtain these files you can follow the instructions at http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#firmwareinstallation in the section that refers to firmware version 4.80. You then need to put the executable firmware (ucode5.fw), and the couple of files as above, b0g0bsinitvals5.fw and b0g0initvals5.fw, into /lib/firmware/b43 folder. Remember that this firmware was only tested with the b43 driver coming with kernel version 2.6.27-rc5. To make firmware work properly type: modprobe b43 qos=0 If you need help: If you need help, send a message to the OpenFWWF team.