irda dial-up (any oz release)

[Harlequin]

Hello,

I bought a sony ericsson Z600 earlier this year and I've had no luck dialing out through it.  I've followed the details in assorted posts (most recently this one) with limited success ie it works fine through a friend's nokia but doesn't with either sony ericsson I have.  

I had some success with earlier cacko roms but no sharp rom offers all the functionality I need.  I've tried connecting using every OZ rom, but to no avail.

On the other hand, every version of OZ (except 3.5.1, for some reason) can send and receive files to/from the SE phone without issue, so I know they can talk to each other.

From my limited knowledge of linux, my understanding is that the I/O to the /dev files are controlled by drivers compiled into the kernel.  From my experimentations it's obvious that another aspect of the ir driver is used for ppp comms than simple file transfer.  

Time for the naive question.  How would I get the functionality of earlier cacko kernels into the OZ kernel for /dev/ircomm0?

At the moment, despite the fact that I have it set to debug, pppd returns no errors on the command line, so I don't even know what's going wrong.

thanks,

Harry.

SL-5500 'Collie'

[Ling]

I would really appreciate it if you would post your instructions to the Sharp ROMs portion of the forum as I can't get IRDA to work with my T637. I read the post you mentioned, but I don't think it applies to Cacko/Sharp ROMs.

[lardman]

I've followed the details in assorted posts (most recently this one) with limited success ie it works fine through a friend's nokia but doesn't with either sony ericsson I have.

Possibly a hint here ;-).

Don't worry, I know your pain; the first thing I tried to do when I got my Z was to work out dial-up (with Sharp ROM 2.38 iirc). Painful process.

So it works fine with the Nokia? But not with the Sony Ericsson, this points towards the Sony Ericsson being non-conformant; however you allude to the fact that you had it working with Cacko, or did you mean something else?


Si

[Harlequin]

Yes, I've had success with this in the past using the cacko rom.

From my understanding of various posts, it seems that the sony ericsson IR implementation does not completely conform to the standard.  In later roms Sharp closed down their implementation of the protocol, and IR dial-up stopped working for SE phones.

It looks from posts like this one (fix is the same, despite the fact that that release was for SL-C7x0) that a patch was included in the kernel and adding the following settings in /proc

echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/irda/max_tx_window
echo 1000 > /proc/sys/net/irda/min_tx_turn_time

restored the previous functionality.   Unfortunately I'm not entirely clear on what's going on here.  Either way /proc/sys/net/irda/ is RO in OZ.

I'd welcome any ideas.

Thanks,
Harry

[Harlequin]

OK, making progress.

Further to my investigations, I've since found that this issue with sony ericsson phones is across all linuxen using 2.4.x kernel and above.

A description of the issue can be found here (search for "buggy phones" on the page).

So the solution I mentioned in the last post should work.

The only difficulty is that any attempt to create a new file in /proc/sys/net/irda results in the following error

Code: [Select]

# pwd
/proc/sys/net/irda
# echo 1000 > min_tx_turn_time
cannot create min_tx_turn_time: No such file or directory

even as root.  I've tried chmodding it, copying in the file etc but nothing seems to work.

I had a look in /etc/mtab and proc is mounted as follows (using OZ 3.2 today)

Code: [Select]

proc /proc proc rw 0 0
and obviously the system can update it, so I'm at a bit of a loss as to what's going on.  I checked /etc/init.d/ for any reference to mounting /proc.  All I could find of interest were the lines:

Code: [Select]


test -d /proc/1 || mount -n /procand

Code: [Select]


mount -f /procin checkroot.sh.

From the man page for mount both the -n and -f flags relate to write permissions under specific circumstances.  I haven't made any progress beyond that though.  I remember the dire warnings about messing with file mounts and the possibility of bricking the zaurus.

Anyone have any ideas on how I can create files within /proc/sys/net/irda/ ?

Thanks

Harry.

[inman]

Anyone have any ideas on how I can create files within /proc/sys/net/irda/ ?

Proc is a virtual filesystem designed to expose kernel data and functions to processes via a filesystem protocol.  You generally can't create files in /proc because the subdirectories there represent features of the kernel; individual drivers in the kernel create representational directories and/or files which serve to provide information to the user (eg. /proc/cpuinfo) or allow the user to change runtime variables in kernelspace, (eg.  your min_tx_turn_time tweak).  Thus, creating a new file or directory in a virtual filesystem is impossible because (again) the files and directories there represent the runtime environment of the kernel and you shouldn't expect to be able to add kernel features (eg. an IrDA driver) by simply making changes to a filesystem (eg. mkdir /proc/sys/net/irda).

Hope this helps; it can be a difficult concept to get used to.

[Harlequin]

Thanks for that.

I've gone over the various ROMS, kernels and builds that I've used in the past, and you're correct, I can't create a file where there was none before.  I can only add to the configuration details that are already present.

Here's a sample listing from an earlier cacko kernel with theKompany rom:

Code: [Select]

# cd /proc/sys/net/irda
# ls
devname             lap_keepalive_time  slot_timeout
discovery           max_baud_rate       specific_dev
discovery_slots     max_noreply_time    warn_noreply_time
discovery_timeout   max_tx_window
fast_poll_increase  min_tx_turn_time
#
So in this case the max_tx_window and min_tx_turn_time switches were included during compilation of the kernel?  Back to the naive question at the start of this thread.  How would I enable those switches in an openzaurus kernel?  Any articles I've found relating to irda and linux kernels have a touch of "yep I know how to get there, but I wouldn't start from here" about them.

thanks

Harry.

[waxor]

BUMP

Enabling the extra Irda stuff is just a matter of setting some kernel config options, then recompiling the kernel.  However, I have no clue where to get a hold of the kernel source for OZ 3.5.x, and how to load it onto the Z.  I've looked at docs everywhere, messed around with the OZ build system, and nothing on where the kernel source is or how to install a custom-compiled kernel on the Z.  Just the old Sharp docs which are pretty useless unless you want a custom old sharp kernel.

Someone please point out  the location of the OZ 3.5.x kernel source and possibly docs on how to install custom kernels on the Z? Thanks! Maybe then I can finally get vpn working on the Z too.

James