[PATCH] HAL support for HSO modems

[Dan Williams]

On Mon, 2009-01-12 at 17:23 +0000, Colin Watson wrote:
> This pair of patches adds sufficient support for HSO modems to work out
> of the box with NetworkManager. It's somewhat similar to what's supplied
> by Option in the hso-udev package (under GPLv2+, as far as I can see),
> but I took a slightly different approach since this seemed more suitable
> for direct integration into hal/hal-info.
> 
> (I also needed
> https://lists.one-eyed-alien.net/pipermail/usb-storage/2009-January/004499.html
> to make the device go into modem mode straight away, along similar lines
> to existing quirks for other devices from the same manufacturer.)

There are few problems with this at the moment...

0001-set-info.hsotype-for-ttyHS-devices.patch
----------------------------------------------

- just make the check for ttyHSx additional to the ttyUSBx; I don't
believe there's a need for another section at all.  There's no need to
label the device as an "HSO Serial Port"; it's just a serial port like
any other serial port and doesn't deserve special treatment.  Anything
that cares whether it's an HSO serial port can simply look at the driver
attribute of the devices parent to find that out.

- the 'hsotype' stuff is not standardized and should not be added until
it is.  If you want to add port types, then lets add port types to the
HAL spec for *all* devices.  I've wanted to do this for a while, so lets
kick that discussion off.  Furthermore, the port types should be
standardized in the kernel too and exported via a standard sysfs file if
needed.  Ericsson F3507g apparently can change port types via AT
commands, so maybe we'll need some other mechanism to override this, but
if the device has hardcoded port types and only the driver knows about
them, then the driver should be exposing those.  HAL then translates
them with *standard* mappings to a standard HAL property.


0002-set-capabilities-and-modem-command-sets-for-HSO-mode.patch
---------------------------------------------------------------

- info.hsotype shouldn't be required (see above)

- "wwan" is not a standard hal capability.  Neither is "GPS" or "debug".
We need to standardize TTY port capabilities.  Care to present a
proposal?  We need to find out from Option what exactly these
capabilities are, and what the "debug" port or "Application" ports are
actually used for.


Basically, the correct way to support these things is to make a generic
specification for the things you need, rather than manufacturer-specific
hacks.  There's a need for this generic spec, but that need is also
deeper than HAL and needs to be accessible to udev as well.  Sierra,
Novatel, and Ericsson all have different port types that we need to
identify, and there's no reason to have 4 different standards for this.

Dan