[Meego-architecture] Reading device specific information

[Auke Kok]

On 11/03/10 01:20, Mikko.K.Ylinen at nokia.com wrote:
> Hi,
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Auke Kok
>> Sent: 02 November, 2010 18:51
>>
>> On 11/02/10 07:13, Marko Saukko wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> in N900 there is calibration area which contains information such as bt
>>> and wlan MAC addresses. Is there an existing framework in MeeGo 1.2 that
>>> could be extended with plugins to support reading/setting of this type
>>> of device specific data?
>>>
>>> Couple of features in BMC related to this:
>>> http://bugs.meego.com/show_bug.cgi?id=9551
>>> http://bugs.meego.com/show_bug.cgi?id=9548
>>
>> I assume that this information is available through the connman Dbus
>> API's... but I'd have to confirm to be sure. In any case, it seems like
>> a good start.
>>
>> What exactly needs to have this information?
>
> I think the original question is about where the data is stored
> on a device. It cannot be on a filesystem because it needs to preserve
> over flashing. Furthermore, it's not only about bt and wlan mac but
> general 'key, value' pair type of data.
>
> N900 has a separate partition ('calibration area') on OneNAND and that
> is accessed through libcal.
>
> There's nothing available for this yet. The first question would be:
> should this be in MeeGo or should it be hardware adaptation specific?

on first glance it sounds hardware specific - on ia32 we have dmi, and 
most drivers pull information like this from a piece of firmware.

my first thoughts would be to implement a shared kernel module that can 
retreive/set values in the calibration area and acts as an agent to all 
the kernel drivers that need to get MAC addresses, and then exports the 
data through sysfs (or something like that) for values that are 
generally only accessed and/or written from userspace.

But, it would be good to see what exactly this area is used for...

Auke