On Jun 25, 2008, at 05:31 AM, Michael Buesch wrote:
On Wednesday 25 June 2008 05:55:25 Pavel Roskin wrote:On Tue, 2008-06-24 at 22:07 -0500, Larry Finger wrote:I agree that ssb-sprom should be rewritten; however, before that is done, we need to think carefully as to what variables should be exposed for a user. For instance, should antenna gains be brought out? What about antenna enable variables? Is there any reason for a user to change these?The reason would be to fix wrong values. I believe everything should beavailable. If there are any specific concerns about specific fields, there should be warnings. If there are chances to brick the device, there should be big warnings, or perhaps the entries should have a read-only flag. Anyway, ssb-sprom is not for casual users.The intention of ssb-sprom _never_ was to be used by users. It is a development tool. So there's nothing going to get removed from it, nor are there read-only checks added. We could, however add a warning to the helptext of the app: DO NOT USE THIS. YOU WILL BRICK YOUR DEVICE. These threads clearly show that people are using the tool who have absolutely _no_ clue what the tool really does. -- Greetings Michael.
The problem with your statement is that as far as I could locate, this is the only tool that allows you to modify the subsystem vend/ prod ID's and to tweak antenna gains to improve performance of a card.
I know what I want as an end result, the lack of available software for my OS has had me go outside to another OS to find a solution which appears to be b43.ko, ssb-sprom and ssb.ko.
I can buy card-A from my OS vendor, he charges $100.00 for the card, BestBuy sells the same card using the same chipset but the gain is lower and the ID's are different and the cost if $21.00, it makes economical sense to purchase the $21.00 card, change the ID's and tweak the gain if 3 cards are required per system and the time to modify 3 cards is less than 15 minutes.
The advantage to modifying a card for my OS is obvious to those who use it, no custom drivers are required, no installation of a custom driver which takes roughly 5 minutes is required and additional OS features are activated with the use of a natively recognized card that are not activated using the custom driver and a card that isn't natively recognized.
My OS vendor isn't releasing the source for the native driver so making it work with generic ID'd cards is not very fruitful despite what people may tell you because they only understand a portion of the card identification process and they assume thats all there is, the thought that the driver is self modifying based on the subsystem ID's never enters their mind.
Considering it is a utility with a very unique and powerful capability, the ssb-sprom application itself is fairly harmless because it does not operate directly on a card however in my OS, I do not have this luxury, I have a single tool that reads the sprom data to disk, makes changes, saves it again with a timestamp and writes it back to the card in one fluid move which is a much more serious and potentially dangerous app in that errors of any kinds are most destructive so all but the ability to modify the ID's has been stripped until time permits me to rewrite it into a more useful set of tools to accomplish the task in stages.
Since my app is based on the ssb-sprom program, modification of the subsystem ID's has not been an issue but other changes would be beneficial to improving a cards performance and I'd like to take advantage of this option.
At this time I'm working with ssb-sprom in a standalone setting and working with data files rather than directly on a card so when the bugs have been ironed out I can redo my app with some extra safety features and a final prompt before writing to a card and know that the written data will be correct.
Since this tool has been around for quite some time I was under the impression that it was a solid performer which is undergoing updates to handle the new sprom data but seeing it needs a little massaging is disappointing, not discouraging, while my needs are immediate, quick fixes to keep me in motion are the main focus but when a little time permits I look into resolving something provided is doesn't eat too much of my time but my motivation is based on my needs and not the needs of the general public and this could be advantageous to resolving some issues if they are related to my immediate needs or they could not be.
I don't mind that it's broken (well I do) cause it does meet one of my requirements and that is ID modification and for the most part this is my major need, fixing the other stuff basically would allow me to take an alright card and turn it into a great card but as you already know, information is not very forthcoming from Broadcom so progress is slow.
-- Dale
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