Fibocom L850-GL / Intel XMM7360 support

[Dan Williams]

On Wed, 2020-01-08 at 10:00 +0100, Bjørn Mork wrote:
> James Wah <james-mmgr at laird-wah.net> writes:
> 
> > Hi gang,
> > 
> > I've been working on a PCI driver for the Fibocom L850-GL, and
> > while
> > it's very rough at this point, it sure does transfer data.
> > 
> > If anyone is interested in developing support in MM, or in shaping
> > the kernel driver into something people might actually want to use,
> > now
> > would be a good time to get involved. MM integration is well beyond
> > my
> > available time & expertise - I've just been doing this reverse
> > engineering for fun - but I'd be very happy to contribute what I
> > can.
> > 
> > The modem does not speak MBIM over PCI, though it does expose some
> > AT
> > ports. Most tasks eg. PIN management can be done via AT commands.
> > 
> > In order to initialise the modem, though, or to bring up a raw IP
> > interface, it's necessary to speak a custom RPC protocol. This is
> > unpleasant, but not unpossible; the driver I have uses a Python
> > userspace component to do so. The protocol is ugly but not
> > complicated,
> > so a C port wouldn't be too involved.
> > 
> > The driver, and associated RPC tooling, are currently available
> > here:
> > 
> >     https://github.com/xmm7360/xmm7360-pci
> > 
> > A little documentation on the RPC protocol is also available:
> > 
> >     https://github.com/xmm7360/xmm7360-pci
> 
> Great stuff! Almost makes me want to buy a device to play with ;-)
> 
> Being responsible for a number of historical userspace API mistakes I
> should probably just shut up now....  But just in case you haven't
> been
> following this discussion:
> 
> https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-wireless/msg186483.html
> 
> I have no idea where this has led.  But you should probably discuss
> the
> userspace API with Johannes and Marcel (I assume Dan and Aleksander
> is
> already on the task) before introducing the new driver.

Johannes says the Intel folks will be submitting drivers to staging
"any time now" for that family of devices (7360, 7460, 7560). What the
actual architecture of those drivers is and how you communicate with
them, I don't recall.

Dan