opensource firmware
Hello folks, we have been involved in the past few months in testing modifications to the standard 802.11 MAC for research purposes. During this time we did some tests with Broadcom 802.11b/g boards and we wrote down a simple 802.11 compliant firmware that we used as a starting point for the modified MAC algorithms. Although the base firmware is not fully 802.11 compliant, e.g., it does not support RTS/CTS procedure or QoS, we believe that someone could be interested in testing it. The firmware does not require the kernel to be modified and it uses the same shared memory layout and global registers usage of the original stuff from broadcom to ease loading by the b43 driver (and ease our writing...). We wrote it to make the b43 driver recognize it as Broadcom version 5 firmware: it still uses the original initval files of that version of the Broadcom's firmware, we do not include them as usual users have to extract these files following the b43 installation instructions. Lorenzo and I tested this firmware only on 4306 and 4318 hardware (pci and minipci, pc-card based architectures seem to have problems), and we did simple tests on the integrated board of a Linksys WRT54GL, so we are quite sure it runs on 4306, 4318 and 4320 cards. We did all the works on kernel 2.6.27-rc5-wl. The firmware along with the instructions to build it from the assembly code using the tools developed by the b43 community can be found here http://www.ing.unibs.it/openfwwf In the firmware website you can find more information about the fw algorithm, its interaction with Broadcom hardware and other information that we discovered as we were writing it. We would like to underline that this work would have not been possible without the instruments already developed by the b43 community (assembler/disassembler), hardware specifications (sipsolution's website), the opensource test firmware written by Michael Buesch and useful talks with those guys (b43 developers), which we deeply acknowledge. As we used several definition files written by Michael for its firmware and we have prepared a source tar file that includes them, we kindly ask Michael if this could be a problem. Finally we stress that this is a TEST firmware and some stuff needs to be fixed (e.g. RTS/CTS and QoS), we have been using it as a starting point to implement other MAC algorithms for research purposes: if someone is interested in this kind of work and would like to share ideas also on research topics, please let us know. Cheers, Francesco Gringoli Lorenzo Nava ___ Bcm43xx-dev mailing list Bcm43xx-dev@lists.berlios.de https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/bcm43xx-dev
Re: Thoughts about the b43 RNG
On Friday 09 January 2009 02:30:56 Harvey Harrison wrote: On Thu, 2009-01-08 at 17:28 -0800, Harvey Harrison wrote: On Fri, 2009-01-09 at 02:11 +0100, Michael Buesch wrote: I was doing some random tests on the b43 hardware RNG. These are the results. I patched the firmware to not access the RNG register anymore. The unpatched firmware does two things. It reads the RNG register to get random values and it writes 0 to the register every now and then for whatever reason. Both reads and writes were patched out during my test. So the driver was the only one accessing the RNG. This is the result of reading a few bytes from the RNG with the patched fw: I'm not sure about this. There aren't any obvious patterns. But maybe I'm just blind. Does somebody else see some pattern or has some RNG test program to recognize such patterns? So let's do another test. Let's modify the previous test to write 0x instead of 0: NIST has a pretty good test suite I think. Packaged for debian as dieharder if you want the command-line version. Thanks. I didn't know it was already packaged. So I'll certainly try it. -- Greetings, Michael. ___ Bcm43xx-dev mailing list Bcm43xx-dev@lists.berlios.de https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/bcm43xx-dev
Re: opensource firmware
On Friday 09 January 2009 09:21:52 Francesco Gringoli wrote: We would like to underline that this work would have not been possible without the instruments already developed by the b43 community (assembler/disassembler), hardware specifications (sipsolution's website), the opensource test firmware written by Michael Buesch and useful talks with those guys (b43 developers), which we deeply acknowledge. As we used several definition files written by Michael for its firmware and we have prepared a source tar file that includes them, we kindly ask Michael if this could be a problem. Of course not. Thanks for doing the hard work! -- Greetings, Michael. ___ Bcm43xx-dev mailing list Bcm43xx-dev@lists.berlios.de https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/bcm43xx-dev
Re: Thoughts about the b43 RNG
I was doing some random tests on the b43 hardware RNG. These are the results. As you're german, you should get a look at the current c't 2/2009. At page 172 it has a in-depth articel about randomness tests. They also have some tools to download, see http://von-und-fuer-lau.de/random-tools.html http://www.heise.de/ct/09/02/links/172.shtml ___ Bcm43xx-dev mailing list Bcm43xx-dev@lists.berlios.de https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/bcm43xx-dev
Re: opensource firmware
On Fri, Jan 09, 2009 at 09:21:52AM +0100, Francesco Gringoli wrote: we have been involved in the past few months in testing modifications to the standard 802.11 MAC for research purposes. During this time we did some tests with Broadcom 802.11b/g boards and we wrote down a simple 802.11 compliant firmware that we used as a starting point for the modified MAC algorithms. snip The firmware along with the instructions to build it from the assembly code using the tools developed by the b43 community can be found here http://www.ing.unibs.it/openfwwf In the firmware website you can find more information about the fw algorithm, its interaction with Broadcom hardware and other information that we discovered as we were writing it. I hereby declare this to be Fully Awesome! (TM) John -- John W. LinvilleLinux should be at the core linvi...@tuxdriver.com of your literate lifestyle. ___ Bcm43xx-dev mailing list Bcm43xx-dev@lists.berlios.de https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/bcm43xx-dev
