Jay Carlson
2013-10-22 16:04:25 UTC
Since Newegg has dropped the price on the 3T3R Western Digital N750 Atheros wasp/S17 entry to $30, I expect some more interest in this standard-looking ar9344 + ar8327 platform. I've got a couple of n750s lying around, but I haven't made any progress on getting the gigabit switch connected up to the on-chip Ethernet.
There's GPL source code for these "Project Seattle" platforms, and N600 support is in trunk. This helps, but the N600 uses the ar934x internal switch which is rather different from the gigabit NAT switch in these. There's GPL source for the N600 and N750 from WD, and it's in fairly good shape, but unfortunately the switch configuration is performed in scripts and/or a binary ag71xx driver.
I think I should be able to imitate other ar934x+ar8327 devices, but I think I'm missing some concept, or I need to read some device state out of a stock device in order to replicate it. In the bootloader the ar8327 switch works, but I don't have bootloader source, and one of the last things the bootloader seems to do before boot is shut down the switch. (Perhaps this is to keep Linux from seeing anything from the net until the firewall is up.) And the interaction of MACs, PHYs and mdio buses makes my head hurt.
One thing I do see is a bunch of phy_id garbage on mdio0:10-17 and six phy_ids of the ar8327 on mdio1:00-05. My *guess* is that ag71xx.0 is connected directly to port 0 of the ar8327 like the other wasp/s17 devices, but mdio1 is used instead of mdio0. I've made it as far as ag71xx.0 coming up in multi mode, but I seem to get the generic PHY instead of ar8327 despite the phy_ids matching up (and with what I think is a correct boardinfo.)
(Also, something seems messed up with the openwrt firstboot squashfs split code: on the next reboot, the bootloader looks at the seama partition info and declares the kernel to not only be corrupt, but to have a non-ASCII md5sum. That kind of thing I feel competent to solve but there is little point if I can't get the wired ethernet up.)
Does the switch setup problem sound familiar? I can back out all my printk garbage and post my (clueless) board setup code if it would help. I can mail a box to somebody who's worked with ar934x, although I've never mailed hardware outside this country (US) except for work.
Jay Carlson
***@nop.com
There's GPL source code for these "Project Seattle" platforms, and N600 support is in trunk. This helps, but the N600 uses the ar934x internal switch which is rather different from the gigabit NAT switch in these. There's GPL source for the N600 and N750 from WD, and it's in fairly good shape, but unfortunately the switch configuration is performed in scripts and/or a binary ag71xx driver.
I think I should be able to imitate other ar934x+ar8327 devices, but I think I'm missing some concept, or I need to read some device state out of a stock device in order to replicate it. In the bootloader the ar8327 switch works, but I don't have bootloader source, and one of the last things the bootloader seems to do before boot is shut down the switch. (Perhaps this is to keep Linux from seeing anything from the net until the firewall is up.) And the interaction of MACs, PHYs and mdio buses makes my head hurt.
One thing I do see is a bunch of phy_id garbage on mdio0:10-17 and six phy_ids of the ar8327 on mdio1:00-05. My *guess* is that ag71xx.0 is connected directly to port 0 of the ar8327 like the other wasp/s17 devices, but mdio1 is used instead of mdio0. I've made it as far as ag71xx.0 coming up in multi mode, but I seem to get the generic PHY instead of ar8327 despite the phy_ids matching up (and with what I think is a correct boardinfo.)
(Also, something seems messed up with the openwrt firstboot squashfs split code: on the next reboot, the bootloader looks at the seama partition info and declares the kernel to not only be corrupt, but to have a non-ASCII md5sum. That kind of thing I feel competent to solve but there is little point if I can't get the wired ethernet up.)
Does the switch setup problem sound familiar? I can back out all my printk garbage and post my (clueless) board setup code if it would help. I can mail a box to somebody who's worked with ar934x, although I've never mailed hardware outside this country (US) except for work.
Jay Carlson
***@nop.com