Can the devs give a short/expanded overview of WCN3660 and how it communicates with the driver?

[Eugene Krasnikov]

I am not aware of monitor mode been supported by wcn36xx/prima drivers.

2015-02-13 3:18 GMT+00:00 Farm Dve <farmdve at data.bg>:
> After poking around the Prima driver and doing some debug prints, I
> discovered something interesting, I think. WLANTL_RxFrames which is
> called as a callback from WDTS_RxPacket seem to be receiving packets
> of type eWLAN_PAL_PKT_TYPE_RX_RAW(number 3) when not associated with
> any access point. And while I have not verified it, I believe these
> are full unstripped 802.11 frames that could be used, the only problem
> is they seem to get filtered out somewhere, and I get 0 packets in
> tcpdump.
>
> Here is my previous message that I failed to include in the list:
>>>Thank you for the reply Mr. Bjorn.
>
>>>I've looked around in the original Prima driver, and as far as I saw,
>>>it doesn't have the necessary code to set the chip in monitoring
>>>mode(this happens with iwconfig wlan0 mode monitor which in turn does
>>>an ioctl call with the SIOCSIWMODE. And even if it did, the fw needs
>>>to not give us fake ethernet packets, but all the frame data we need.
>>>So to sum it up, we need to instruct the fw that we want to not
>>>connect to any specific AP, make the fw send us everything without
>>>stripping the frames.
>
>>>Kind regards.
>
> On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 6:48 PM, Bjorn Andersson <bjorn at kryo.se> wrote:
>> On Wed, Feb 11, 2015 at 4:52 PM, Farm Dve <farmdve at data.bg> wrote:
>>> I asked Mr. Bjorn and he was very helpful, but I am looking at the
>>> sources, all of them and I cannot wrap my head around it. I would like
>>> to just throw this quickly, that I am not experienced with the linux
>>> kernel. Lots of stuff are still hard to grasp, such as how wcn36xx
>>> communicates with userspace APIs for networking(such as
>>> socket,recv,buf).
>>>
>>> We have the wcn36xx driver, we also have drivers/staging/prima/CORE,
>>> how exactly are they related?
>>> If wcn36xx is the driver, what is the purpose of prima/CORE? I looked
>>> at prima and there are a bunch of folders with..awful and
>>> non-descriptive names, although the files are documented it leaves a
>>> lot to be desired. Such as HDD,VOSS,DXE and so forth.
>>
>> The prima driver is the original Qualcomm/Atheros driver, the wcn36xx
>> driver is a reimplementation of that driver using the frameworks
>> provided by the Linux kernel. You can see the benefit of this by
>> comparing the amount of code in the two implementations. (although
>> wcn36xx isn't feature complete yet).
>>
>>> What about wcnss in net/wireless/wcnss, is it obsolete thanks to wcn36xx?
>>>
>>
>> The wcn36xx driver is the driver for the WiFi part of the combo ship -
>> also including BlueTooth and FM-receiver. The wcnss driver seems to be
>> the driver for the combo chip itself.
>>
>> For my mainline testing I reworked the wcnss driver into something
>> "understandable" more to the point. You can find this hack here:
>>
>> https://github.com/andersson/kernel/commit/f3b1e9ed5a803aafb4e4f76dc007fa33e38314a9
>>
>> [..]
>>> I have not figured out if the actual firmware loaded by PIL has some
>>> sort of strict verfication preventing altering of the firmware.
>>
>> Correct, but as far as I understand the firmware you have can work in
>> monitoring mode with the official driver. So you should not need to
>> change the firmware.
>>
>>> Basically too much info is still hidden, so much for Atheros/Qualcomm
>>> participating in a joint open-source project.
>>>
>>
>> Please look around the mainline kernel, Qualcomm is doing a lot of
>> work in the Linux kernel. That work will lead to us having the
>> dependencies in place for actually working on this driver in mainline.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Bjorn
>
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-- 
Best regards,
Eugene