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

[Dan Staples]

Thanks so much for this update, Ben! Presumably we shouldn't migrate
Commotion-router to BB until the latter is released as stable, so
hopefully that will be sooner rather than later :)

But it's great to hear OpenWRT trunk is working smoothly in VM-Ware.
That will open up some great possibilities for testing in the future.

Dan

On 01/31/2014 02:20 PM, Ben West wrote:
> 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 I'm trying to set aside time to update these presently out-of-date wiki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
> <mailto: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 <mailto:me at benwest.name>
> 
> 
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-- 
Dan Staples

Open Technology Institute
https://commotionwireless.net
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