Primary Firmware Download

[Foy, Patrick]

Pavel,

Thanks for all your help on the RAM download!

I gotten the primary and secondary RAM download to work pretty reliably, but
I am having issues with the PDA.  

I've changed a few things with the download procedure, so that it is
performed in a two step process.  

1. In an offline procedure, the prism2_srec utility generates a compilable
header file (primary_fw.h or secondary_fw.h) that is compiled into prism2
driver

2. At run time, the hostap_download reads the firmware from global memory
and then downloads the content into the WLAN card.

We have an embedded application that requires all the download work to be
done in the driver because if the card goes through a reset, the application
might not know about the reset and therefore won't reload the firmware into
RAM.

The prism2_srec utility can be run on any machine to auto generate the
primary_fw.h and secondary_fw.h files.  However, the PDA information is
obtained from the WLAN card that is used to create the files and this PDA is
added to the secondary_fw.h.  Part of the PDA is the mac address.  After
loading the firmware on multiple AP devices, we discovered that all units
had the same MAC address (ooops!).

I changed the download code to read the pda before the download begins and
then restore the pda after the download completes.  This fixes the mac
address problem, but the reported version is the previous version
information.

Any ideas how I can update the PDA to fix the version information?

Thanks.

Patrick

      

-----Original Message-----
From: Foy, Patrick 
Sent: Thursday, July 31, 2003 4:29 PM
To: 'Pavel Roskin'
Subject: RE: Primary Firmware Download


Pavel,

We are shipping APs with Senao cards (2511CD-Plus), some with primary
firmware 1.0.5 and others with 1.1.0.  We need secondary 1.7.4 for WDS,
Enhanced security, scanning, etc which requires primary of 1.1.0 or newer.  

The reason that I need to upgrade the primary with hostap (either into RAM
or flash) is because we have shipped 100s of units and they need upgraded
"in the field" (and we don't want to open the cases to re-flash the cards
using winupdate).  I've read that updating the primary into flash isn't
reliable, so I wanted to take the least risky route, which is uploading to
RAM.

Upgrading the secondary into RAM seems very reliably, but loading only the
secondary firmware is only a solution for cards with primary 1.1.0.  I need
to find a solution that allows me to upgrade the older cards (primary 1.0.5)
with a primary version that supports a secondary version of 1.7.4

Thanks for your help.

Patrick
   


-----Original Message-----
From: Pavel Roskin [mailto:proski at gnu.org]
Sent: Thursday, July 31, 2003 4:03 PM
To: Foy, Patrick
Cc: hostap at shmoo.com
Subject: RE: Primary Firmware Download


On Thu, 31 Jul 2003, Foy, Patrick wrote:

> We've been avoiding the primary firmware download issue for our project,
but
> have finally decided to re-visit the issue.  Since this last email, have
you
> been able to download the primary firmware into RAM successfully (and
> reliably) using the hostap driver and the prism2_srec utility?

No.  It doesn't work.  But I don't think you need it.  If you think you
need it, please give more details.  What kind of hardware are you talking
about?  What primary and secondary firmware do you have?  Why do you want
to upgrade primary firmware in the RAM?  What's wrong with flashing the
latest primary and secondary firmware?  Cannot you just load secondary
firmware into the RAM?

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin