atheepmgr: Atheros EEPROM manager

This is a utility to dump and update the EEPROM content of Atheros based wireless NICs.

atheepmgr supports several operations such as parsing and printing the EEPROM content, updating the EEPROM contents and so on. The utility can access EEPROM content of a real NIC and can works with EEPROM data that has been dumped to the file. You can find a few usage examples below.

The following EEPROM content access techniques are supported:

• via driver specific debug interface (using Linux ath9k/ath10k drivers)
• via mapping of the PCI device I/O region (using libpciaccess)
• via mapping of the directly specified device I/O region
• file dump

The following OS(s) are tested/supported:

• FreeBSD
• GNU/Linux
• OpenBSD

Warning

Using the utility may be potentially dangerous for your hardware and may cause a local laws violation. The utility is intended for use by qualified software developers and (or) radio engineers. So the

DISCLAIMER

The author(s) are in no case responsible for damaged hardware or violation of local laws by operating modified hardware.

Building

Utility building as simple as typing make (or gmake on BSD platforms). Builing requirements:

• gcc
• GNU make
• pkg-config (optional, used only to build with libpciaccess support)
• libpciaccess (optional, allows accessing PCI devices by specifing its location, e.g. bus and device numbers)

Usage examples

Print EEPROM content of PCI device

Accessing the device which was specified by its address at PCI bus is probably the most simple accessing method.

Example: to print the EEPROM content of a wireless NIC, which is located at PCI bus #1 device #3 just run:

# atheepmgr -P 1:3

NB: to access a hardware as a PCI device you should build the utility with the libpciaccess library support.

Print EEPROM content of device with known I/O region

Accessing the device's EEPROM by directly specifying the device I/O memory location can be useful for embedded platforms where using the libpciaccess library could be an overkill.

Example: print EEPROM content of an AR9220 based device, which I/O region starts at 0x21000000:

# atheepmgr -t AR9220 -M 0x21000000

or

# atheepmgr -t PCI:0029 -M 0x21000000

NB: Former form is useful when you do not know an exact chip type, but you are still able to obtain PCI Device Id via some side interface (e.g. pciconf(8), lspci(8) or pcidump(8) utility, or Linux sysfs). NB: To obtain the device I/O region location you can examine the output of the dmesg(1) command (or check the /proc/iomem file on GNU/Linux based platforms) .

Parse and print contents of an EEPROM file dump

Useful option for (re-) checking NIC configuration without really attaching it to a host.

Example: print data from a EEPROM dump in file eep.bin, which was extracted earlier from a AR9220 based wireless NIC:

# atheepmgr -t 5416 -F eep.bin

or using chip name instead of EEPROM map (layout) name:

# atheepmgr -t AR9220 -F eep.bin

NB: chip autodetection is not supported for file access, so you should specifiy EEPROM map (layout) or chip name manually. To see a full list of supported EEPROM maps use a -h option.

Print EEPROM content of a network interface via driver

NB: at the moment only Linux ath9k/ath10k debug interfaces are supported, you driver should be build with enabled debugfs support (true for OpenWrt distro).

This access method useful in case of your Linux kernel blocks device I/O memory access via the /dev/mem. To access device EEPROM you should specify either network interface:

# atheepmgr -t 5415 -D wlan0

or Linux ieee80211 phy name:

# atheepmgr -t 5416 -D phy1

Dump NIC EEPROM content to the file

Example: preserve a wireless NIC EEPROM content to the eep.bin file

# atheepmgr -t PCI:0029 -M 0x21000000 save eep.bin

TODO

• Make the utility more scripts-friendly by adding an option to print EEPROM content in a more structured format
• Add a support for loading a file content to the NIC EEPROM to restore somewhere corrupted EEPROM data
• Add a support for automatically enable and wake-up the chip if it not yet active (e.g. if driver is not loaded, or if network interface is DOWN)
• Add option to modify RfSilent settings

EEPROM info sources

• Linux kernel driver for AR5xxx chips: https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/drivers/ath5k
• Linux kernel driver for AR9xxx chips: https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/drivers/ath9k
• Legacy Atheros HAL (for AR5xxx chips): https://github.com/qca/qca-legacy-hal
• ath_info utility from MadWifi project: http://madwifi-project/svn/ath_info and https://github.com/mickflemm/ath-info

History

Originally based on the edump utility from https://github.com/mcgrof/qca-swiss-army-knife project and then hardly reworked to add support for legacy chips, EEPROM modification, file dumps and so on.

License

This project is licensed under the terms of the ISC license. See the LICENSE file for license rights and limitations.