Swapping Drives

[Black Hole]

In this context, I wonder if anyone has got a USB->Ethernet adapter working? Presumably it would have to be a dongle matching the Ethernet device built into the BCM7405 SoC, whatever that might be.

Is the OS going to be looking for a USB-attached Ethernet port?

 

[Black Hole]

I wonder if this is because I left both Humax boxes on for sometime, while working on "SMB sharing", allowing them to be discovered

Yes. Initial discovery (for DLNA) seems to take a considerable time sometimes, but is not a problem thereafter.

 

[xyz321]

In this context, I wonder if anyone has got a USB->Ethernet adapter working? Presumably it would have to be a dongle matching the Ethernet device built into the BCM7405 SoC, whatever that might be.

I think it should be possible but it depends very much on the chipset used in the dongle. The drivers have to be built with the ancient kernel we use. I have one which uses the Realtek 8152 chip but its driver will not compile with this kernel. I think we are more likely to succeed with older hardware (unless it is broken).

Drivers can be built for the following chipsets (all USB 2.0, 10/100 Fast Ethernet):

RTL8150
Asix AX88178, AX88772, AX887660.

These are just some drivers I have attempted to compile, there may be others which would work.

 

[/df]

I was hoping that Broadcom might have used the same Ethernet 10/100 core in some chip that was found in a USB Ethernet adapter. But apparently not.

From the Humax online sources, the kernel is built with this Ethernet support:

CONFIG_NET_ETHERNET=y
CONFIG_MII=y
CONFIG_BCMINTEMAC_7038=y
CONFIG_BCMINTEMAC_NETLINK=y
CONFIG_BCMINTEMAC_7038_STREAMING=y

Sadly that just tells us that the BCM7405's built-in Ethernet is compatible with the earlier BCM7038 STB.

Looking next in the stblinux-2.6.18-7.1_r3761 kernel source archive, there is the drivers/net/brcmint7038 folder, where there are comments implying that a similar 10/100 Ethernet core was used in the BCM7110 STB and BCM6345 modem/router, also from 2003.

I can't see anything that links it to a stand-alone Ethernet device.

So, if you had a broken on-board LAN device and wanted to restore wired networking, I suppose that you would have to connect first by WiFi, then add the appropriate kernel module (an init script as for the cifs package) and, since the settop program only knows about eth0, probably also an init script to connect the network interface, like the wifi-up script.

All of this could be wrapped in a package that could then be installed automatically from a USB stick, as a bundle or a single package, to avoid requiring WiFi access.

Looking at the cheapest 10/100 devices available now:

• this YS-AX88772B needs the Asix AX88772 driver which says it has been verified for kernel 2.6.14 up;
• this JP1082 needs the RealTek RTL8152 driver, which dates back to kernel 2.43.10.

 

[xyz321]

There is a driver for an RTL8150 in the kernel source drivers/usb/net/rtl8150 but I am not sure if any devices are available which still use it.

The RTL8152 driver does not compile without lots of errors.

The AX88772 might be the best bet.

 

[/df]

Indeed, a little least significant digit confusion!

If I happen to find such a dongle in my spares, I'll give it a try.

 

[xyz321]

I have had a partial success with an AX88772 dongle which now appears as eth1. The problem I have is that if I shutdown eth0 then when the Humax app. attempts to communicate over the network it recognises a failure and shuts down eth1 as well.

It might be possible to fool it by renaming the interfaces or changing the startup order so that the USB interface appears as eth0.

 

[xyz321]

This now works with the following caveats:

• The original eth0 device must still be present.
• The cable to the original ethernet connection must be disconnected
• The original device must be able to indicate that the cable is disconnected.
  If the default 192.0.2.100 address is assigned in DHCP mode then it should be a good candidate.
• The USB -> Eth adapter must be plugged in before starting up and must remain plugged in.
• The AX88772X driver must be loaded.

If anyone is interested I can package up the driver.