onboard wireless on rpi4

[Klaus Cucinauomo]

Hi Björn,
thanks that you’re still willing to invest work in aarch64 wifi.

> SDIO attach worked last year; 

Ive tested that on RPI(4) extensively (of course with MMCCAM),
but as you already know(I assume), a brcmfmac-driver needs a loader mechanism for 
the proprietary firmware -files and a mechanism to translate the nvram-file.
Nvram-translation can be done via an external program or can be built in into the driver.
So I really wonder how you got a brcmfmac- chip to work 
without implementing those special drivers(and mechanisms) ????????

… I speak German like you  :-) so maybe I understood you wrong in the English language, sorry in advance ..

> - in case you are not only into RPi, the nanopi/rk33xx platforms with onboard SDIO WiFi need tiny little glue bits to turn the bits on;  would be great if someone could just do that.

The list of platforms which will load the firmware/nvram could be much longer than rpi/nanopi and as mentioned 
in my earlier post it`s possible that 2 versions of the same board have to load different firmware-files
( that was the case for nanopi , as far as I remember,(I didn’t work much on aarch64 the last weeks)…

So long Blabla of details :-) … what I really wanted to know/ask you:

??? Are you working on the brcmfmac-driver AND the firmware-loading-mechanism???
??.. or are you doing things far more extended&advenced than my skills and knowledge of this topic:-) ???

Thanks and best Regards

Klaus


 

> Am 05.09.2020 um 14:15 schrieb Bjoern A. Zeeb <bzeeb-lists at lists.zabbadoz.net>:
> 
> On 4 Sep 2020, at 17:35, Klaus Cucinauomo via freebsd-arm wrote:
> 
>> Yep, my question if really no one else is working on it, was directed to Björn ;-),
>> because I don’t want to work on a completely different implementation,
>> if Björn is perhaps a few steps further.
> 
> SDIO attach worked last year;  WiFi (cfg80211) wasn’t finished.  And I am not tired of hearing people ask for it.  You have all the right to do so.
> 
> I recently got a PCIe card (different bus attachment) but it should help to move forward on the WiFi parts as well.  Yes, it is a free time project at the moment but it also benefits from other ongoing WiFi work.
> 
> 
> Two things which may help for the RPi/SDIO parts are:
> 
> - please try and use MMCCAM kernels and help, test, debug, report, .. all the things you find so (other people) can jump in as well so we can switch that on as default.  Without that, no SDIO.
> 
> - in case you are not only into RPi, the nanopi/rk33xx platforms with onboard SDIO WiFi need tiny little glue bits to turn the bits on;  would be great if someone could just do that.
> 
> 
> Bjoern