Older blog entries for broonie (starting at number 125)

UK landline non-security (and Orange clue)

Yesterday when I got in from work I got my second letter in as many months through from BT saying that my account was being closed as my landline was being transferred to another provider. This was the first I’d heard of this and it causes a cancellation charge so I called to complain; the first time I did this they said they couldn’t tell me anything about who the line had been transferred to. They did tell me that there was no equivalent of PAC or MAC for landlines and that the only thing stopping this happening is the two week delay in implementing.

This time BT felt able to tell me that the line had been transferred to Orange so I phoned Orange. Orange told me that the phone number had indeed been transferred to them in the name of someone else. They also said that they had no intention of attempting to carry out any authentication that lines being transferred to them are owned by the person they’re being transferred to – I explicitly asked them if anyone could just do this for any phone number and they confirmed that this is indeed the case.

BT claim they can’t block transfers for regulatory reasons; Orange claim this is possible and that I should just do that. I’ve asked Orange to put a note on the account (which was the best they claimed they could do) and complained to OFCOM (who won’t really talk to me without a formal escalation from the phone providers) but none of this really helps given the gaping security holes in the system. You really should need more information than just the phone number itself to transfer a number.

On the slightly bright side I still appear to have phone service; presumably currently paid for by whoever is initiating the transfers.

Syndicated 2012-10-31 12:24:20 from Technicalities

regulator updates in 3.6

Linux 3.6, which was released earlier today, saw continuing improvements in the factoring out of common code in the API – lots of new features making drivers smaller and easier to write!

• Initial framework support for GPIO controlled enable signals, saving a bunch of code in drivers.
• Move fixed regulator enable time and voltage mapping table specifications to data.
• Used some of the recent framework enhancements to make voltage change notifications more useful, passing the voltage in as an argument to the notification.
• New drivers for Maxim MAX77686, TI LP872x and LP8788, Samsung S2MPS11, Wolfson Arizona microphone supplies and LDOs

Syndicated 2012-10-01 12:54:11 from Technicalities

regmap updates in 3.6

Linux 3.6 was a very quiet release for regmap:

• Support for buses and devices specifying their endianness, providing some performance improvements for MMIO devices.
• Support for wake IRQs in regmap-irq.

Syndicated 2012-10-01 12:50:58 from Technicalities

Speaking at ELC-E: “regmap: The Power of Subsystems and Abstractions”

I will be speaking at ELC-E in Barcelona this year, with a talk entitled regmap: The Power of Subsystems and Abstractions. I look forward to seeing some of you at the conference, perhaps even in the audience!

Syndicated 2012-09-20 21:23:26 from Technicalities

ASoC updates in 3.5

The big news for ASoC in 3.5 is the first two changes here which are pretty major features for the subsystem:

• Dynamic PCM support, allowing support for SoCs with internal routing through components with tight sequencing and formatting constraints within their internal paths or where there are multiple components connected with CPU managed DMA controllers inside the SoC.
• Greatly improved support for direct digital links between off-SoC devices, providing a much simpler way of connecting things like digital basebands to CODECs.
• Much more fine grained and robust locking, cleaning up some of the confusion that crept in with multi-component.
• CPU support for nVidia Tegra 30 I2S and audio hub controllers and ST-Ericsson MSP I2S controllers
• New CODEC drivers for Cirrus CS42L52, Freescale MC13783, LAPIS Semiconductor ML26124 and Texas Instruments LM49453.

Syndicated 2012-07-25 12:00:25 from Technicalities

Regulator updates in 3.5

There’s been a bit of an increase in the amount of core work in version 3.5, regmap has enabled a lot of code to be factored out of drivers and into the core so drivers only need to provide data. This makes things a lot simpler to implement and review, it’s hoped that it will also allow some framework enhancements for bulk operations in future.

• Helpers in the core for regulators using regmap, providing generic implementations of the enable and voltage selection operations which just need data to describe them in the drivers.
• Split out voltage mapping and voltage setting, allowing many more drivers to take advantage of the infrastructure for selectors.
• Support for Ricoh RC5T583, TI TPS62362, TI TPS62363, TI TPS65913, TI TWL6035, TI TWL6037

Syndicated 2012-07-22 19:03:33 from Technicalities

regmap updates in 3.5

A surprisingly large series of updates for regmap this time, mostly due to all the work Stephen Warren has done to add support for MMIO buses. This wasn’t really the target for the framework but it turns out that there’s a reasonable number of cases where it’s very helpful to use the register cache support to allow the register map to remain available while the device is suspended.

• A MMIO bus implementation, contributed by Stephen Warren. Currently this is limited to 32 bit systems and native endian registers.
• Support for naming register maps, mainly intended for MMIO devices with multiple register banks. This was also contributed by Stephen Warren.
• Support for register striding, again contributed by Stephen Warren and mainly intended for use with MMIO as typically the registers will be a fixed size but byte addressed.
• IRQ domain support for the generic regmap-irq controller, allowing devices to dynamically allocate interrupt ranges and support device tree bindings.
• A function dev_get_regmap() which allows frameworks using regmap to obtain the regmap for a device from the struct device, making life a little simpler for them.
• Updates to regmap-irq to support more chips (contributed by Graeme Gregory) and to use irqdomains.
• Support for devices with 24 bit register addresses.

Syndicated 2012-07-22 18:37:36 from Technicalities

regulator updates in 3.4

This has been a fairly quiet release from a regulator point of view, the only real framework features added were devm support and a convenience helper for setting up fixed voltage regulators. Much more coming next time, though! The most noticeable thing in the changelog is that Axel Lin continued his relentless and generally awesome stream of fixes and cleanups.

• Managed (devm) versions of regulator_get() and regulator_bulk_get() simplifying error handling and resource management for drivers.
• Added a convenience interface for setting up fixed voltage regulators.
• Device tree support for TWL4030.
• New drivers for Freescale i.MX Anatop, Samsung S5M8767, TI TPS62360 and TPS65271 regulators.
• Removed BQ24022 in favour of the more generic gpio-regulator driver.

Syndicated 2012-05-24 18:08:44 from Technicalities

regmap updates in 3.4

Things are really quieting down with the regmap API, while we’re still seeing a trickle of new features coming in they’re getting much smaller than they were.

• Support for padding between the register and the value when interacting with the device. This is required by some devices with high speed control interfaces in order to give the device time to get the values ready.
• Support for applying register updates to the device when restoring the register state. This is intended to be used to apply updates supplied by manufacturers for tuning the performance of the device (many of which are to undocumented registers which aren’t otherwise covered). For want of a better term this feature is known as a patch.
• Support for two bit address, six bit value registers contributed by Wolfram Sang.
• Support for multi-register operations on cached registers contributed by Laxman Dewangan.
• Some additional diagnostics available via debugfs for the cache state.
• Support for syncing only part of the register cache, useful for devices with power domains or sub devices which can be reset independently.
• Stubs and parameter query functions intended to make it easier for other subsystems to build infrastructure on top of the regmap API.

plus the general bug fixes and tweaks you’d expect.

Syndicated 2012-05-24 18:07:16 from Technicalities

Anne Brown (1946-2012)

BROWN Anne After a long illness bravely fought, Anne Margaret (nèe Wilson), wife of Fred and mother to Mark, enthusiastic Scottish country dancer. Service to be held at Borders Crematorium, on Friday, May 25, 2012, at 11 am. Donations, if desired, to Marie Curie Cancer Support. Family flowers only.

Syndicated 2012-05-22 16:01:39 from Technicalities