ECI driver develpment - help request

[Stanislaw Gruszka]

On Tuesday 05 January 2010 13:17, Enrico Mioso (@atlantide) wrote:
> Hi all!

Hi.

> I'm a new member of this list - so I'm pleased to know you all.
Well, list is not very active last years.
 
> ECI modems, are those sold by A LOT of vendors, with a Globespan chipset. At 
> least where I live, ALL usb modems you can buy are ECI-based, and many friends 
> in other countries have them too.
> So, I was interested in trying to develope an ECI driver, for the current 
> kernel. My coding experience in this area is very low, but I'm seriously 
> intentioned to learn, and so this is a "call for help".
> As many of you may know (even looking at the ECIADSL project), no docs about 
> this chipset are vailable. The good news is that a GPL'ed driver exist, from 
> Globespan directly, running under Linux kernel 2.4. But it's a vendor-driver: 
> so that
> - many functions in the kernel have been open-coded here 
>    (for example, ez-usb functions have been re-written badly... from scratch by
>    driver's autors)
> - the driver is not so well-commented
> - the code is very sparse...
>
> I can provide:
> - ECI hardware: a lot of ECI hardware (the first and second chipset brand)
> - volunty to learn

That's everyting you need to write driver by your own :) I'm afraid old
usbatm drivers developers are busy or have no longer ADSL
connection. I can help advising you.

First of all you need to establish project page at some free hosting service
like sourceforge.net or gna.org and develop there, then perhaps some
new developers will join to the project. 

usbatm is not documented, you can look at drivers at drivers/usb/atm/
in linux kernel tree, how things are done. Please note there is xusbatm
module which allow to write drivers in user space.  Since eciadsl have kernel
and user space part, maybe xusbatm is what you need, but I don't know
you have to decide by your own. If kernel part need to be done please
assure you write code that can be easily merged by linux maintainers,
read Documentation/{SubmittingDrivers,SubmittingPatches,CodingStyle}
from linux tree. Good point start writing linux kernel device driver
is book available at: http://lwn.net/Kernel/LDD3/

If you will have any quesions ask here, I will respond if I will know
the answer. 

Cheers
Stanislaw