OESF Portables Forum
General Forums => General Discussion => Topic started by: kurochka on November 07, 2005, 02:18:13 pm
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There is a guy selling an SDIO WiFi card on ebay.com (look for auction number
5825239786). He says that it will work on a Zaurus PDAs that have an SDIO. As far as I know there is no SDIO driver for any of the Z's. What is this guy talking about? I only heard about one card that has SDIO stack for Z and even that it is buggy.
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There is a guy selling an SDIO WiFi card on ebay.com (look for auction number
5825239786). He says that it will work on a Zaurus PDAs that have an SDIO. As far as I know there is no SDIO driver for any of the Z's. What is this guy talking about? I only heard about one card that has SDIO stack for Z and even that it is buggy.
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c-guys did have an sdio wifi card, but it was very limited in what it could do, and its drivers (I presume kernel modules) were only useable with one particular release of the sharp rom.
sadly, the SD slot is really just a memory card slot, and not even a full-speed SD interface at that :-(
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c-guys did have an sdio wifi card, but it was very limited in what it could do, and its drivers (I presume kernel modules) were only useable with one particular release of the sharp rom.
Did they ever release source code to the driver? If the kernel hacking people can figure out how to "speak" the SDIO protocols, maybe other cards could be re-engineered to work.
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c-guys did have an sdio wifi card, but it was very limited in what it could do, and its drivers (I presume kernel modules) were only useable with one particular release of the sharp rom.
Did they ever release source code to the driver? If the kernel hacking people can figure out how to "speak" the SDIO protocols, maybe other cards could be re-engineered to work.
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The problem is that SDIO open source stacks (if there exist any) may be illegal. See [a href=\"http://linuxdevices.com/articles/AT6640645071.html]http://linuxdevices.com/articles/AT6640645071.html[/url]
http://lists.arm.linux.org.uk/pipermail/li...ber/006423.html (http://lists.arm.linux.org.uk/pipermail/linux-arm/2003-October/006423.html)
However, I wonder if Codelligence Embedded SDIO stack can be used:
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS6386804526.html (http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS6386804526.html)
Also, this article claims that an SDIO proprietary stack was ported to C3000 Zaurus.
http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS9692674403.html (http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS9692674403.html)
embWiSe also had ported SDIOWorx on Sharp Zaurus SL-C3000 PDA. The SDIOWorx package for Zaurus SL-C3000 comes complete with the stack/Bus driver and drivers for the Host Controller, SD/MMC memory cards, SDIO-Bluetooth (Type A) and SDIO-WiFi.
http://www.embwise.com/new_support_sdio.htm (http://www.embwise.com/new_support_sdio.htm)
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The problem is that SDIO open source stacks (if there exist any) may be illegal. See http://linuxdevices.com/articles/AT6640645071.html (http://linuxdevices.com/articles/AT6640645071.html)
Interesting read. But, the guy admits he is not a lawyer (neither am I), and his analysis primarily coveres the case where the SDIO license has been signed. His analysis does not apply to a clean reverse-engineered driver. The patent issue could matter, but there are many examples of open source software and patents in weird coexistence. It depends on many factors, including country of developers, and aggressiveness of patent holders.
I'll check out the technical links later. It would be neat to have a Zaurus SDIO project.
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I use to have a sdio wifi card and i remeber it bieng fairly bad, it also had the common problem of not working after about a month of usage.
besides bluetooth would thier be much benifit from somthing like this?
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I use to have a sdio wifi card and i remeber it bieng fairly bad, it also had the common problem of not working after about a month of usage.
besides bluetooth would thier be much benifit from somthing like this?
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I think there would be lots of benefits. A real SD would mean faster SD read/write if I understand it correctly (so, your SD memory cards will be much faster). Then, there will be no limitation of 1GB for SD slot (I think that's right).
I would love to use SD slot for WiFi card instead of CF because it is hard to hold the Z with the CF WiFi sticking out.
You already mentioned bluetooth.
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I use to have a sdio wifi card and i remeber it bieng fairly bad, it also had the common problem of not working after about a month of usage.
besides bluetooth would thier be much benifit from somthing like this?
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I think there would be lots of benefits. A real SD would mean faster SD read/write if I understand it correctly (so, your SD memory cards will be much faster). Then, there will be no limitation of 1GB for SD slot (I think that's right).
I would love to use SD slot for WiFi card instead of CF because it is hard to hold the Z with the CF WiFi sticking out.
You already mentioned bluetooth.
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Sadly, this has been covered elsewhere in the nearly resoundingly negative. The fellows who have the skill to do this are the Open-Zaurus guys, but as MickeyL has noted on several occasions, they just don't have the time. They have one really sharp kernel-guy who can write device-driver code, but he has a demanding day-job and they have a lot of uses for him with just keeping the regular kernel working. So, in the end, we won't see an SDIO stack anytime soon unless somebody volunteers to work on it.