Wifi investigations in FC6/60 Gig PS3

[dwmyers]

Ok, This is a pic I got off the yellowdog forums, but it's a nice pic of the Marvell chipset in the PS3:



Unlike some reports, this is not a Broadcom chipset.

One of the first things I did with my PS3 was use the FC6 installation method posted here to do a minimum install of FC5. When I tried dhclient, I couldn't find anything. When I used ifconfig -a, all I saw was the gigabit ethernet card (eth0) and the loopback address. I looked around and the tools for examining wifi hardware are things like:

iwconfig
iwlist

and those are in the wireless-tools package. When I loaded the wireless tools package and ran iwconfig, I got an error like:

/proc/<some dir>/wireless not found.

If you install wireless-tools in FC6 and run it, you get something like this:

eth0 no wireless extensions.

lo no wireless extensions

This should give you some idea that the problem runs deeper than just a missing driver.

Some notes: yum won't run on your FC6 disk as is, but if you go to the link below:

http://www.city-fan.org/tips/YumRepoFromImages

you can make a yum repository that uses your FC6 DVD. It isn't perfect and doesn't understand groups (more accurately, doesn't know of any groups) but it does understand dependencies. That helps.

Okay, another link to set up some assertions. If the PS3 FC6 kernel understood wireless you should be able to install the drivers for zd1211 usb to wireless cards. These are cheap and available and a discussion of ALL you need to get them running can be found here:

http://zd1211.ath.cx/

Please note that the kernel, in order to run wireless, must have the flag CONFIG_NET_WIRELESS enabled.

okay, cd to /boot. In this directory, you will see a file named 'config-2.6.16'. This is a list of the flags that have been enabled or disabled for your current working kernel. Just do this:

grep -n CONFIG_NET config-2.6.16

and you'll see 20 or so lines of text, none of which contain anything regarding wireless.

We can do more than that. First, use yum and add the following from a minimal install:

yum install bzip2 coreutils cpio diffutils gcc gcc-c++ gzip make patch perl rpm-build redhat-rpm-config sed tar unzip which

Next, remove the FC6 disk and mount the Add-on disk. cd to /usr/src and run the following command:

tar -xvfj /mnt/cdrom/src/linux-20061208.tar.bz2

cd to /usr/src/linux-20061208

In the meantime, you might want to unmount the Add-on disk and pop it into a computer with a web browser, where you want to look at /doc/LinuxKernelOverview.html

Go to the section called "how to build PS3 Linux Kernel" and read it.

Then go back to the linux-20061208 directory in /usr/src and run the command

make ps3pf_defconfig

After you're done, examine the .config file created. Pretty much the same thing you saw in the config in /boot.

In conclusion, Linux PS3 users, we have a larger problem than just finding a Wifi driver. We have a kernel rebuild in order, and I'm not skilled enough at kernel tinkering to tell if the stock Linux wireless code is even supplied by the source in the Add-On disk.

Notes: I couldn't have gotten this far without a lot of help from the inhabitants of the 'fedora-ppc' irc forum on freenet.org. I'm not the genius here, just the stubborn mule who kept trying all this stuff.

David.

[Crymson]

Well, isn't the rumor that Sony is working on them? Perhaps you could get wifi drivers as a module in to the kernel (thus eliminating the need for a recompile)

I guess I'm not surprised that the linux kernel doesn't know anything about them out of the box, otherwise wouldn't it stand to reason that we might have some kind of limited functionality already?

Anyway, only time will tell.

[dwmyers]

The drivers don't do you any good if the kernel doesn't understand wifi to begin with.

More specifically, these header files are missing from the bz2 tar file supplied in the addon disk:

/include/config/net/wireless.h
/include/config/net/wireless/rnetlink.h

The wifi drivers are separate code found in the directory

/drivers/net/wireless/

Ironically, a bit of wireless code is left behind in the 2.6.16 kernel, the file

/include/linux/wireless.h

** aside: how to prove the above **

1. mount the Add-On disk
2. tar -tvfj /mnt/cdrom/src/linux-20061208.tar.bz2 | grep wireless
3. unmount the addon disk
4. mount the FC6 DVD
5. cd /mnt/cdrom/Fedora/RPMS
6. rpm -qlp kernel-devel-(whatever) | grep wireless
7. compare outputs.

---- even more notes ----

/include/linux/wireless.h may in fact be the piece of the kernel that "does" wireless. There is also the source in the bz2 file /net/core/wireless.c.. if we can figure how to turn those on, and compile the source, then maybe we get lucky and have a wireless enabled kernel.

++++ yet even more notes ++++

The net/core/wireless.c is generic wireless support, and it is turned on with CONFIG_NET_RADIO. That's the first step in heading towards Wifi support on the PS3.

David.

[cyanide]

What's worrying is that a lot of hardware is virtualised through the hypervisor, so until someone hacks it or Sony opens it up, there's no way to access it.

[dwmyers]

Well, the hypervisor does some useful things. For one, a potential PS3 virus can't hack your PS3 and turn eth0's promiscuous mode on.

I recompiled the kernel with CONFIG_NET_RADIO on and I'm running on the recompiled kernel. If I look in /proc/net when using the recompiled kernel, I see /proc/net/wireless. I'm trying to compile the zd1211 wireless driver (which for now is choking because it's not setting the __powerpc64__ flag).

David.