[PATCH] hal-info : Support for Option Globetrotter HSDPA Modem

[Dan Williams]

On Tue, 2008-11-18 at 00:26 +0100, Linus Walleij wrote:
> I also had an experience with this modem a few days ago, had to return it
> due to bad Linux support ...
> 
> 2008/11/17 Dan Williams <dcbw at redhat.com>:
> 
> > just to be clear, this is _without_ any ZeroCD device mounted,
> 
> It is. The device is detected by the kernel as a "hso"
> http://lxr.linux.no/linux/drivers/net/usb/hso.c
> 
> It creates three serial ports /dev/ttyHS{0|1|2}

Yeah, I've got two hso devices.

> All of them should have identical entries then. But can't we just detect
> use of the "hso" kernel module instead?? (Not that I'm all into how
> HAL does this kind of stuff...)

Not necessarily, because most cards will expose more than one port, so
you still have to isolate based on the serial.interface or
usb.interface.  Many of the ports aren't actually modem ports.

This is where autoprobing comes in, which has been discussed, and I'll
be working on this in the next few weeks.  Once the autoprober has been
been integrated into udev and the appropriate HAL magic added, we won't
have to keep adding entries to the fdi file, though we may still have
the "double-port" problem if the device exposes more than one port that
can take AT commands.

> > if this modem does ZeroCD?  A few of the option devices will act like a CD when
> > you first plug them in, until you send the SCSI rezero command to them.
> 
> Rezero is a tool from the vendor I think, and it has to be installed in parallel
> in order to switch from USB Mass Storage to "HSO" mode. It is called from
> udev directly in the examples I've seen, and the sample udev.rules for
> it only cover a few devices.

It is.  However, this needs to be integrated into the kernel driver like
the Sierra TruInstall support has.  This means a thin libusual shim that
handles the mass storage device and sends rezero whenever the device is
mounted (unless you've used a module parameter to alter that default
behavior), and then the hso driver can take over and provide ttyHS0 and
hso0.  This is the correct way of handling these things, not in udev or
otherwise.

Dan