connman + modemmanager

[Aleksander Morgado]

On Fri, Mar 13, 2015 at 6:22 PM, Uwe Geuder <nfyzrjqgd6 at snkmail.com> wrote:
> I'll take the risk of being blamed for cursing in church or just asking
> a stupid question...
>

Neither one nor the other!

> For reasons out of my control we use connman in our project. So far it
> has been Ethernet and WiFi and it has just worked.
>
> Now there is a new requirement to support 3G USB dongles (well and I
> guess 4G, too). I understood connman does that using ofono, but there
> have been some doubts how alive and up to date that project really is.
> I know it has been used at least in a couple of phones and it seems to
> work there (I happen to own such a phone:). But with USB dongles
> everybody expects you to support "all" of them, in a phone you just have
> one modem. So I think it's a fundamentally different question.
>

Plus, in the newest phones I know of that use ofono, it is acting as
mid-layer between Android's RIL and the DBus API, if I'm not mistaken.
i.e. not just one modem, but really a single one (android's RIL).

> So I might consider to recommend ModemManager to our project, because I had
> the feeling it is actively maintained (at least a couple of years ago
> when I had trouble with my own 3G dongle).
>

Well, it's maintained, as long as we have free time :)

> 2 questions come to my mind:
>
> - is combining connman + modemmanager reasonable at all? Has anybody
>   done or even considered it? Any work estimates?
>

No idea. I don't know ofono's API too well to compare it with MM's
one. Truth be told, they shouldn't be very different...

> - I'd like to use the argument that modemmanager is actively maintained
>   but when looking at
>   http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/ModemManager/SupportedDevices/
>   I must state that it has been nearly a year since the last update.
>   Any explanation for that? (I'm not here to blame anybody, I do know that
>   in open source projects there are always fewer volunteers than tasks
>   to do)

That list doesn't show maintainership status. I wrote that list a long
time ago and we don't really update it much, basically because most
new modems come as QMI or MBIM and all those tend to work well.

If you want to see how active the development may be you want to check
the git repo:
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/ModemManager/ModemManager/log/

Same for ofono:
http://git.kernel.org/cgit/network/ofono/ofono.git/log/

Also, to be fair, you really need to compare features.


ofono has things that MM doesn't (e.g. contacts, sim toolkit...) and
MM has things that ofono doesn't (e.g. MBIM...). They also have
different deps; while ofono depends on Glib, MM depends on GLib with
GObject and GIO.

My POV has been that MM is a very good generic platform if you're not
targeting a specific modem, as you said. MM is good with lots of
different modems. Ofono also has generic modem support, but I think
it's much more tailored to support well some specific modems (don't
take my word as 'the truth' though, it's just an impression).
Although, well, ModemManager also does specific tailoring for some
modems (e.g. the ones Google use in Chrome OS platforms, or the ones
I'm paid to develop as a freelancer).

It really depends on your needs I guess :)

-- 
Aleksander
https://aleksander.es