[Commotion-dev] Update on commotion-router under x86

[Ben West]

Teasing out this topic from the thread on UBNT auto-reset ...

To more thoroughly beat the dead horse of running commotion-router as an
x86 guest under VM-Ware, I can now confirm that trunk (and presumably
Barrier Breaker) works just fine under VM-Ware, and specifically with the
TP-Link USB adapter TL-WN821N v3.  This would presumably offer another
option for reflash-free firmware testing.  Indeed, I've run recent
commotion-router as a VM-Ware guest, along with a copy of Puppy Dog linux
as a 2nd guest, and used Firefox on Puppy Dog to complete QuickStart on the
commotion-router guest.

However, the current generation of commotion-router derived from AA seems
to have something wrong at the kernel level, which prevents the USB wifi
adapter from reliably initializing on boot.  This messes with QuickStart
and another auto-configuration tools, who see no wireless interface at all
on power-up and react as expected (i.e. badly).  A possible work-around
I've found is to include the package *usbreset*, and then issue the
usbreset command at some appropriate point during power-up to bring the USB
wifi adapter up, so that Commotion's auto-config routines can proceed
normally.  That is, issuing usbreset at the command line on the VM-Ware
guest commotion-router seems to reliably bring up the USB radio for me,
allowing me to run QuickStart on the Puppy Dog guest.

I realize few people care about VM-Ware, but my suspicion is that since the
kernel-level problem with USB adapters and commotion-router (and OpenWRT)
seems to go away entirely when I exchange the commotion-router guest with
an openwrt-trunk guest, this problem may *also* currently affect folks
wanting to run Commotion with a USB radio on devices like a raspberry PI.

Likewise, commotion-router's eventual migration to Barrier Breaker could
resolve this problem, too.

I'm trying to set aside time to update these presently out-of-date wiki
pages about Commotion under VM-Ware, at least to include the patched I've
been using for mac80211 and the ath9k_htc driver.
http://code.commotionwireless.net/projects/commotion/wiki/Custom-Compile-OpenWRT#Commotion-OpenWRT-x86-architecture
http://code.commotionwireless.net/projects/commotion/wiki/VMware-Player

On Fri, Jan 31, 2014 at 12:53 PM, Josh King <jking at opentechinstitute.org>wrote:


> Primarily, we'd be looking to automate testing on our internal testbed
> as part of our CI process. So we could hook Jenkins up to a script that
> would push images out to the supervisor devices as they're built, and
> those would reflash the nodes and run tests.
>


Ben West
me at benwest.name
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