12 replies to this topic

[lionheart]

The package wpa-supplicant 0.60 on OpenPLI 1.0 (and current) lacks of Zydas support. Zydas support is needed in order to get the driver zd1211b working with WPA/WPA2 encryption. You need to recompile wpa-supplicant with the zydas patch and only then we can use wpa_supplicant with the option "-D zydas".

Configuring the wireless from Enimga2 adds correctly the string "-D zydas" to the file /etc/network/interface:

root@dm800 ~ # cat /etc/network/interfaces
# automatically generated by enigma 2
# do NOT change manually!

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp

	   pre-up /usr/sbin/wpa_supplicant -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -B -Dzydas
	   post-down wpa_cli terminate

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

However wpa_supplicant throws an error when called due to the unsupported driver:

root@dm800 ~ # wpa_supplicant -i wlan0 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -D zydas
Unsupported driver 'zydas'.

I've tried running wpa_supplicant with "-D wext", which is the generic kernel driver, however this does not work (throws "WPA not supported" error when ran with higher debug level) as the module zd1211b needs its own implementation of wpa_supplicant.

I guess the zydas patch must have been in some older version of wpa-supplicant, otherwise we will need to find it somewhere.


PS: Dream Elite 1.33 has it working

[lionheart]

Comes into mind... another solution would be to use a newer version of the zd1211b driver.. that interfaces with the "wext" driver so that we don't need to patch wpa_supplicant, but I don't know if this is possible as the kernel that we're using is quite old... however I found that we are using r222-r0... while on the internet there are some images using r222-r6...

[lionheart]

Ok.. have done some research...

The actual version of the package (0.60) has been committed on 22 Jan 2010:
http://openpli.git.s...1bdd4155ed285a8

Within the file defconfig there's a zydas related string, which suggest that the driver has been compiled with zydas support:

82 # Driver interface for Zydas driver
83 CONFIG_DRIVER_ZYDAS=y

However, I found a previous version on the OE shortlogi, this time dated 27 Oct 2008... it indicates that version 0.6.3 has been backported from dev, but disabled:

http://openpli.git.s...9845091cd12243a

Interesting what it says in the description:

* ported zydas patch from 0.5.8, but doesn't seem to work

So the zydas patch seems to work only with 0.5.8.

Upgrading to 0.6.0 broke the zydas support.

Is that correct?

If yes if would be useful to have 0.5.8 available for download somewhere... that would work with the current OpenPLI... but I understand it would be a PITA to match all of the dependencies. I don't even know if 0.5.8 would work with kernel 2.6.18.

Now Zydas has been taken over by Atheros, and apparently newer kernel have already the latest Atheros driver supporting Zydas devices, and latest wpa_supplicant has support for Atheros drivers.

All good... except that we are running a deprecated version of the kernel from the OE tree and there's nothing that we can do as kernel releases seem to be made by broadcom... ((

Is any dev able to help on this?

I've also tried to use an rt73 usb dongle, but this always gives ESSID=off... don't know what to try more.. seems that wireless is a huge PITA under PLI...

[lionheart]

I seem to have found the solution. wpa-supplicant 0.6.0 is not good for zd1211b. It is also demonstrated in this commit of the opendreambox git repository:

http://git.opendream...4823a5e62e8886c


conf/machine/dm800.conf: use wpa-supplicant 0.5.10 when kernel 2.6.18 is used .. needed for zd1211 vendor driver

...therefore it would make sense if the PLI team would revert back the wpa-supplicant version to 0.5.10 + zydas patch as we are currently using kernel 2.6.18 on the DM800.


Thanks

[lionheart]

Ticket 189 opened in Trac:

http://openpli.pli-i....org/ticket/189

[pieterg]

you think 0.5.8 still compiles for the dm800?
I remember I had to upgrade to 0.6 to get madwifi-ng working again, when we upgraded the dm8k kernel to 2.6.18.
So I was just assuming 0.6 would be required for dm800 as well.

However, if we don't build madwifi-ng for the dm800, we might still get away with 0.5.8.
Can you confirm that putting

PREFERRED_VERSION_wpa-supplicant = "0.5.8"

in dm800.conf fixes things for you (you might need to make a clean build, so we can be sure there are no more hidden dependencies which might fail)

[lionheart]

Hi Pieter,

you don't have to use 0.5.8 but 0.5.10, and apply the zydas patch to this (otherwise, we would still get a wpa_supplicant without zydas support). As you see the OE 1.6 tree for DM800 is using that combination (0.5.10 patched + kernel 2.6.18-7.3) and it's working just fine. I don't know about madwifi-ng though, but these are not included in the image, and I would give priority to the drivers included in the image (zd1211b for instance).

I'm currently running Dream-Elite on the DM800 which has a OE 1.6 environment: zd1211b 222-r1, wpa-supplicant 0.5.10 and kernel 2.6.18-7.3, so I don't see any reason why this should not work under OpenPLI.

Unfortunately I don't have a build environment and cannot experiment this myself... but I would not be too hesitant of going back to 0.5.10, as 0.6.0 is broken for zd1211b anyway...


P.S.: this does not apply only to the DM800, but to any image running 2.6.18. So I'm afraid the package should be downgraded as well for DM500HD and VuDuo..

[pieterg]

I remember that getting wpa-supplicant compile again with the 2.6.18 update, was a pain.
So I'm not sure whether I'm prepared to give it another go, especially now that our main focus should be at getting 2.0 ready.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if 2.0 (or the pre-13 branch) would already fix your problems with wpa-supplicant

[lionheart]

You guys know what is best for the development of the image, so I won't be questioning you on this. But you can be sure that wpa_supplicant 0.5.10 patched for zydas + kernel 2.6.18 works, and many images have it working. Also OE 1.6 does. If you want me to grab the patches necessary for 0.5.10 to compile I'll try to find them, however looking at OE 1.6 should be enough.

Anyways, when you say 2.0, do you mean OE 2.0 with kernel 2.6.3x ? That would perhaps fix it, if it has already the new atheros drivers. Could you by chance tell me which kernel version runs 2.0 so that I can look by myself into the sources and figure out which drivers do they have?

[pieterg]

we're still using the 2.6.18 kernel in 2.0.
The thing with 1.0 is that it's based on a very old oe branch.
So we had to perform a lot of tricks to get the kernel (and kernel drivers) built with a differnt gcc version than the remainder of the packages.
So every time we start changing some kernel module recipes, that usually means more trouble.

With 2.0, which is based upon 'todays' org.openembedded.dev, we no longer need all those workarounds, so picking the correct wpa-supplicant recipe will probably be less painful.

However, if you can find a working recipe + patches for our 1.0 branch, of course we would be happy to use it.

[lionheart]

As soon as I have time to install Linux somewhere I will have a play with the sources and find a proper recipe for wpa-supplicant 0.5.10. Hope to provide a solution soon. As for the OE1.6, I understand this will be only in OpenPLI 2.0. However it will take some time before it becomes stable, as 1.0 entered the stable branch just a few days ago.

How long will it take before we can see OE1.6 (2.0 branch) for the beta? (master?)

TIA

[pieterg]

you can build and use 2.0 right now. But it needs more work before we will switch the master branch to 2.0

[lionheart]

you can build and use 2.0 right now. But it needs more work before we will switch the master branch to 2.0

Yup I know, even though I will try to find the right recipe for 1.0 as that's what I want to use in the DM800. Mine was a question just to understand if there was any ETA for merging 2.0 into master, or if there's still a lot of work to do that at the moment it's just "it will be ready when it will be ready" :-)