Primary Firmware Download

[Pavel Roskin]

Hi, Jouni!

> It does not work yet. Downloading and starting primary firmware seems to
> require something different than station firmware downloading and
> anything I have tried just "kills" the card (it asserts CmdBusy and COR
> sreset is needed to recover from this). I don't know whether
> documentation for doing PRI download to RAM is available somewherer. If
> it is, I would be willing to implement this feature. Just guessing what
> is needed for it seems to take too much time.

Following is based on my experience with Symbol cards and can be wrong for
Intersil firmware.

You cannot expect the card to work after loading only the primary
firmware.  Primary and secondary firmwares partly overlap, so writing the
primary firmware erases part of the secondary firmware.  You need to load
both in one operation or use only operations supported by the primary
firmware.

The only command that the primary firmware can execute is ReadMIF (code
0x30).  This is done so that the PDA can be loaded and used to plug the
secondary firmware.  Primary firmware also can hold software support
registers.

You may need to set HCR (host control register) to 0x0E before programming
and to 0x07 after that.  If bit 4 (0x10) is set initially, it should be
preserved.  PCMCIA cards with HFA3842 chip have HCR register at address
0x42 in the I/O space.  It's also available as PCMCIA CCSR register
through AccessConfigurationRegister.

Primary firmware doesn't need to be plugged, although you can do it if you
have the PDA already.

You can look here for an example: http://www.red-bean.com/~proski/symbol/

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin