Re: Supporting new Sierra CDMA modems.

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Tue, 2009-03-10 at 10:08 -0700, Chetan Karia wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am an employee of Sierra wireless USA. I was testing network manager
> on Ubuntu 8.10. I found that all Sierra  CDMA modems worked well with
> network manager except our two new products which were not detected by
> Network Manager. On investigating further I discovered its just matter
> of adding the Vendor ID and Product ID of our new devices to the file
> "10-modem.fdi"  under the directory
> "/usr/share/hal/fdi/information/10freedesktop/". Once I edit this file
> and add the VID/PID's the Network Manager detects the devices and
> connects to CDMA network. I wanted to know the procedure to officially
> add the VID/PID's of new Sierra device to 10-modem.fdi file, so that I
> do not have to edit it manually.
> 
> Your help will be much appreciated.

Hi!  Alexander has already described how to get the modem recognized.
Let us know if there's any other questions you have.

In the future, we're going to use modem port detection where a small
program will query the modem for supports AT command sets (using ATI or
AT+GCAP) when its plugged in.  So updating hal-info shouldn't be
necessary for NetworkManager later than 0.7.1.

I have one question for you, however.  Many modems (including some
Sierra ones) expose more than one AT-capable serial port.  On those
modems, usually only one port returns unsolicited responses like CONNECT
that NetworkManager needs to listen for.  Is that also the case with
Sierra modems that expose multiple AT-capable serial ports?  If so, how
do we know which of the ports provides that unsolicited response?

For example, Option NV modems expose up to 4 or 5 AT-capable serial
ports, but for ealier models, only usb interface 0 provides the
necessary CONNECT response.  On later models, the 'hso' driver queries
the Option firmware for port types and exposes that information to
userspace.  Is there a similar mechanism for Sierra?

Thanks!
Dan