Genesis Mode

[Jouni Malinen]

On Tue, Nov 04, 2003 at 09:13:12PM -0600, Dustin Marquess wrote:

> wifi0: trying to read PDA from 0x007f0000: OK

That's interesting.. Either the card is at least semi-alive and provides
working Aux port access or it happened to read some random data that
fooled the driver to believe that the PDA was valid.. I haven't
implemented CRC-16 checksum verification for this, so this may indeed be
just random data having 0 followed by 2 in a suitable place.

Anyway, if the Aux port is actually working, one could, in theory at
least, change the card RAM and maybe even get it running something
useful. However, this would probably be quite difficult without quite
thorough knowledge of the card internals (which are of course not
documented in anything that would be publicly available).

> Could not get RID for component NIC

OK. PRI was not initialized correctly or STA firmware was started but
horribly corrupted..

> hostap_cs: Initialization failed
> Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at virtual address 00000024

> Not sure why cardmgr freaks the kernel out, but I'm not too worried.

I haven't tested the no_primary=1 code with hostap_cs. Having NIC ID
read failing with hostap_pci did not crash the driver, but it is quite
possible that hostap_cs does not handle it so well (probably some
variables were not initialized, etc.). I would either need to get
ksymoops-resolved dump of the error message. I'm not too worried about
it either, but it should be fixed at some point, anyway.

> I tried prism2_srec with the -r option and then with the -g option,
> both errored out:

Genesis mode is most probably not going to work with hfa3841-based card.
Having the Aux port access available might indicate something, but
getting the card really started after downloading suitable code into its
RAM might prove to be quite difficult.

> It looks like it's trying to work, but dies.  Should I take a lucky
> guess that the PRI firmware is hosed and I need to get the card into
> Genesis mode?

It sure looks like the PRI firmware is not running properly.

> If that's the case, I might be crazy enough to try and rip the PCMCIA
> card apart and try to fix it before I spend the money for a new card.
> What pin on the hfa384x do I need to apply voltage?

There was some discussion about this in April.. See Pavel's email for
details:
http://lists.shmoo.com/pipermail/hostap/2003-April/002446.html

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA