Re: Support on vendor id and device id

[Arend van Spriel <arend.vanspriel@broadcom.com>]

+ Greg, +wilc1000 maintainers

On 3/1/2018 11:10 AM, Harsha Rao wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 28, 2018 at 3:08 PM, Arend van Spriel
> <arend.vanspriel@broadcom.com> wrote:
>> On 2/28/2018 12:14 AM, Harsha Rao wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> My suspicion is that your device, is fundamentally a wilc1000 and that
>>>>>>>>> the existing wilc1000 driver will likely largely work for it and all
>>>>>>>>> you really need to do is modify the existing driver to handle the
>>>>>>>>> quirks of your particular implementation of the wilc1000 chip. And,
>>>>>>>>> often WiFi chips will let you change the VID/PID somewhere within
>>>>>>>>> whatever non-volatile storage it has (like where it stores the MAC
>>>>>>>>> address).
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> So it seems the wilc1000 devices from Microchip/Atmel are also using a
>>>>> vendor id they did not buy. Could be that the mentioned 3rd party
>>>>> providing
>>>>> the SDIO IP actually owns that vendor id, but if you are building your
>>>>> wifi
>>>>> chip on that you should better buy you own vendor id from the SD
>>>>> Association. Now if Harsha is actually working for Microchip (unclear to
>>>>> me)
>>>>> there is basically one party that should go shopping.
>>>>>
>>>
>>> I would like to clarify that I am not building anything on top of
>>> microchip wifi device.
>>> We have a different HW . Its been just that 3rd party vendor providing
>>> SDIO IP has given
>>> same ID to different customers.
>>
>>
>> So it is as I said, ie. you are using the 3rd party SDIO IP as is and add
>> your own wifi IP to it? So what does the term "SDIO IP" mean here. Is it a
>> piece of hardware that you hook up to your wifi hardware or is it
>> VHDL/verilog in which the vendor id is defined. If it is VHDL you should
>> really get your own vendor id from the SD Association and fix it. Otherwise,
>> the 3rd party hardware should have means to change it. If not, you better
>> find another party.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Arend
>
> Thank you folks for your comments.
> The SDIO IP is VHDL IP core integrated on our SoC. And we figured out
> a way to update vendor ID at run-time during boot.
> We would get our own vendor ID  from SD association and proceed .

Coming back to this thread as it seems that wilc1000 has exactly the 
same issue or blindly reusing the SDIO vendor id. Below excerpt from 
earlier email in this thread:

"""
 >> In theory the vendor IDs shouldn't be duplicated on fundamentally
 >> different devices, assuming that the manufacturers are doing things
 >> "right". The VID is paid for by buying it from the SD Association.

Indeed. And this is fun already. If the sdio.ids file in systemd has any 
value the vendor id 0x296 is assigned to:

0296  GCT Semiconductor, Inc.
     5347  GDM72xx WiMAX
"""

So claiming it for wilc1000 seems wrong unless GCT and Microchip are 
actually the same company, but I could not find any evidence for that. 
The bad news is probably that this device is already on the market :-(

Regards,
Arend