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:
Code:
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.