Welcome to the new Prism54.org website !
The Prism54 project is now made up of three pieces of software : islsm, a Linux driver which supports the new ISL3886/ISL3887-based devices (known as "newmacs" or "softmac" devices), p54u, which is the FreeBSD equivalent of islsm (only USB devices are supported by now, though) and FreeMAC, aimed at writing a GPL-licensed firmware for all Conexant chipsets (no matter whether they are supposed to run SoftMAC or FullMAC firmwares). FreeMAC is currently unusable for non-developers, but islsm and p54u are functional with SoftMAC firmwares. All these projects are done with no help from Conexant, we have to reverse engineer their designs.If you are new to this site and want to set up your wireless device...
If you have an USB device with an ISL38xx or GW3887 chip, you must use islsm or p54u. See this page.If you have a PCI card :
- islsm should always work, even if your device is equipped with an ISL3886
- there is highly experimental support in p54u (SVN version). Thanks Jean Baptiste for giving me a device.
- if you have a device with an ISL38xx chip which is not an ISL3886, under Linux the FullMAC driver is preferred.
Development news
- 06/02/07 Thanks to Edis who rewrote the GW3887 ROM in C, we can do USB transfers on this chip from FreeMAC (it's being implemented...)
- 24/10/06 Pictures of the WUSB54G internals are online.
- 17/10/06 I updated the wiki address, it should work again now. Sorry for not giving news for this long time, we don't have much time to work on this project anymore, and I fried my Siemens Gigaset (the GPIO ports of the ISL3886 are dead, probably ESD or too much messing up with the data direction registers).
- 20/05/06 Mailing lists are back !
- 25/02/06 Added Microstumbler hardware schematics and instructions.
- 03/02/06 Added the Microstumbler page, an (unfinished) hack to add autonomous network scanning capabilities to a wireless card.
- 20/01/06 p54u 0.8 released. Get it here. Don't forget to read the documentation before upgrading.
- 14/01/06 Thanks to Jean Baptiste, we have a fully functional DMA engine for USB version 1 devices in FreeMAC, meaning we can do high-speed and efficient transfers of frames between the host and the chip, in both ways !
p54u 0.8 is soon to be released, only a couple of bugs need to be fixed. This version will mainly feature FreeBSD 6 support, a new firmware upload scheme (at last, it will work when the device is connected at boot time...), and yet a new fix for the ARM memory allocator, eliminating some random device failures again. The SVN version should be already usable.
We've also got official GPL source code for parsing the EEPROM data - it was included in the GPL software release for the Nokia 770, a PDA that includes a Conexant wireless chip. This will benefit all projects, obviously the drivers but also FreeMAC because the EEPROM contains information about the BBP. Thanks Horst Lederhosen for sending the link.