Porting over the AR8327 support

It's been a while since I posted. I'll post about why that is at some point but for now I figure it's time I wrote up the latest little side project - the Atheros AR8327 switch support.

The AR8327 switch is like the previous generation Atheros switches except for a couple of very specific and annoying differences - the register layouts and locations have changed. So it's not just a case of pretending it's an AR8316 except for the hardware setup - there's some significant surgery to do. And no, I did try just ignoring all of that - the switch doesn't come up and pass packets.

So, the first thing was to survey the damage.

The Linux driver (ar8216.c) has a bunch of abstractions that the FreeBSD driver doesn't have, so that's a good starting point. The VLAN operations and VLAN port configuration stuff is all methods in the Linux driver, so that was a good starting point. I stubbed most of the VLAN stuff out (because I really didn't want it to get in the way) - this turned out to be more annoying than I wanted.

Next was the hardware setup path. There's more configurable stuff with the AR8327 - there's two physical ports that I can configure the PHY/MAC parameters on for either external or internal connectivity. I just took the code from Linux (which yes, I have permission to relicence under BSD, thanks to the driver authors!) and I made it use the defaults from OpenWRT for the DB120. The ports didn't properly come up.

I then realised that I was reading total garbage from the PHY register space, so I went looking at the datasheet and ar8216 driver for some inspiration. Sure enough, the AR8327 has the PHY MDIO bus registers in different locations. So after patching the arswitch PHY routines with this knowledge, the PHYs were probed and attached fine. Great. But it still didn't detect port status changes.

So, back to the ar8216 driver. It turns out that there were a few things that weren't methodized - and these were the bits that read the PHY status from the switch. Both drivers didn't just poll the PHYs directly - they read the switch registers which had a summary of the port status. So, I taught the driver about this and voila! Port status changes worked.

But, no traffic.

Well, there's a few reasons for this. It's a switch, so I don't have to setup anything terribly difficult. The trick here is to enable port learning and make sure they're all in the same VLAN group. Now, here's where I screwed up and I found a bug that needed working around.

The port setup code did enable learning and put things into a vlan group.

Firstly, I found this odd behaviour that I got traffic only when I switched the ethernet cable to another port. Then learning worked fine. I then found that the ar8216 driver actually triggers a forwarding table flush upon port status change, so I added that. This fixed that behaviour.

But then it was flooding traffic to all ports. This is kinda stupid. What did I screw up? I put each port in a separate vlangroup, rather than put them in the same vlangroup. Then, I programmed the "which ports can you see?" to include all the other ports. What this meant was:

• The forwarding table (ie, what addresses were learnt) were linked to the vlangroup the port is in;
• .. and when the switch did a lookup for a given MAC on another port, it wouldn't find it, as the address in the forwarding table showed it was for another vlangroup;
• .. so it would do what switches do when faced with not knowing about the MAC (well, and how I had configured it) - it flooded traffic.

The solution was thankfully easy - I just had to change the vlangroup (well, "port vlan" here) to be '1', instead of the port id. Once this was done, all the ports came up perfectly and things worked great.

So, this now works great on the Atheros DB120 reference board. It's not working on other boards - there's likely some timing issues that need to be resolved. But we're making progress!

Finally, I spent a bunch of time porting over the port configuration and LED configuration stuff from OpenWRT so I didn't have the driver just hard-coded to the DB120 board. I'll update the configuration and code when I get my hands on other boards that use the AR8327 but for now this is all I have.

Enjoy!