linux-kernel - wl1251 & mac address & calibration data

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Message-Id: <201611111820.52072@pali>
Date:   Fri, 11 Nov 2016 18:20:50 +0100
From:   Pali Rohár <pali.rohar@...il.com>
To:     Kalle Valo <kvalo@...eaurora.org>, Pavel Machek <pavel@....cz>,
        Ivaylo Dimitrov <ivo.g.dimitrov.75@...il.com>,
        Sebastian Reichel <sre@...nel.org>,
        Aaro Koskinen <aaro.koskinen@....fi>,
        Tony Lindgren <tony@...mide.com>
Cc:     linux-wireless@...r.kernel.org, netdev@...r.kernel.org,
        linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: wl1251 & mac address & calibration data

Hi! I will open discussion about mac address and calibration data for 
wl1251 wireless chip again...

Problem: Mac address & calibration data for wl1251 chip on Nokia N900 
are stored on second nand partition (mtd1) in special proprietary format 
which is used only for Nokia N900 (probably on N8x0 and N9 too). 
Wireless driver wl1251.ko cannot work without mac address and 
calibration data.

Absence of mac address cause that driver generates random mac address at 
every kernel boot which has couple of problems (unstable identifier of 
wireless device due to udev permanent storage rules; unpredictable 
behaviour for dhcp mac address assignment, mac address filtering, ...).

Currently there is no way to set (permanent) mac address for network 
interface from userspace. And it does not make sense to implement in 
linux kernel large parser for proprietary format of second nand 
partition where is mac address stored only for one device -- Nokia N900.

Driver wl1251.ko loads calibration data via request_firmware() for file 
wl1251-nvs.bin. There are some "example" calibration file in linux-
firmware repository, but it is not suitable for normal usage as real 
calibration data are per-device specific.

So questions are:

1) How to set mac address from userspace for that wl1251 interface? In 
userspace I can write parser for that proprietary format of nand 
partition and extract mac address from it

2) How to send calibration data to wl1251 driver? Those are again stored 
in proprietary format and I can write userspace parser for it.

-- 
Pali Rohár
pali.rohar@...il.com

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