wlan0 internal wifi interface with other linux OS(s)

[Murple2]

Copy of post from developer.planetcom.co.uk (https://developer.planetcom.co.uk/showthread.php?tid=153&pid=371#pid371):

Hi,

I am trying to bring up the internal wifi under Arch Linux using the stock 3.18 kernel (recompiled with module support).

I've copied the firmware from .stowaways in the Debian TP sailfish rootfs to /lib/firmware (and symlinked to /etc/firmware, /system/extra/firmware and somewhere else I forget).

I then compiled these tools - https://github.com/abbradar/wmt. (I couldn't use the one from sailfish rootfs as the were compiled for the wrong arch (armhf? 32 bit?)

I then run wmt_loader and I get the following:

Code: [Select]

init combo device
Opened combo device
get device id : 26519
set device id : 26519
do module init: 26519
failed to init module
I can't for the life of me work out how you are bringing up the wifi in Debian TP - any pointers would be greatly appreciated! Just to clarify I am not even getting a wlan0 interface.  The networking with external devices is fine ie USB ethernet/wifi dongles.

Anyone over here have any thoughts?

[Murple2]

I didn't appreciate how reliant debian TP is on android shims. I really want to get linux running on an open stack without reliance on halium/libhybris.  X with fbdev is fine (apart from the chronic rebooting problem - but that happens anyway it's just worse when I run X) and midgard opensource driver will hopefully mature in the not too distant future (and can hopefully be back ported for 3.18). I know other devices (banana pi r2?) have mediatek internal wifi working natively in linux, but I don't hold out any hope for the telephony/modem (which I am not too fussed about).

Can anyone tell me how the initramfs is configured? The gemian wiki Kernel Compilation pages talks about it containing an "init script forked from hybris-boot, which is currently configured to boot system from /dev/mmcblk0p29 partition" but I can't find reference to this partition. Unless the partition is passed as a variable from little kernel bootloader?  

If anyone familiar with halium can explain a little about what is going on I would appreciate. I want to understand so I can not use it!

PS It made me chuckle how the halium documentation explicitly warns people from porting to mediatek devices! Lulz

[TheKit]

Can anyone tell me how the initramfs is configured? The gemian wiki Kernel Compilation pages talks about it containing an "init script forked from hybris-boot, which is currently configured to boot system from /dev/mmcblk0p29 partition" but I can't find reference to this partition. Unless the partition is passed as a variable from little kernel bootloader?  

If anyone familiar with halium can explain a little about what is going on I would appreciate. I want to understand so I can not use it!

PS It made me chuckle how the halium documentation explicitly warns people from porting to mediatek devices! Lulz

I think that information is a bit outdated. Current version looks for "linux" partition by label. See mountroot() in the /scripts/geminipda of ramdisk (http://pastebin.ws/5q6xzp). It's possible to specify stowaways_os= kernel parameters and then it will mount /.stowaways/{$stowaways_os} of that partition as system root.

Basically initramfs mounts system root and starts systemd, which in turn later starts Android/Halium LXC container.

Heh, that piece of documentation needs to be adjusted, I think. It's not a problem with MediaTek itself, but that lots of cheap MediaTek phones are made by Chinese vendors who don't care about providing even Linux kernel source code under GPLv2, which is no go for Halium, as you can't enable devtmpfs, namespaces and other kernel options needed.