I have been following hostap linux driver development, and often got frustrated by the broken pieces information about upgrading flash firmware. I am documenting what I have found out here in this page.
This page only covers firmware upgrade on flash. It is possible to download firmware to the RAM after system boots up with so-called RAM firmware downloading. That is not covered here.
There are four possible ways to update flash firmware:
- Window-based upgrade with WinUpdate.exe program
- Linux-based upgrade with prism2_srec program that is part of hostap utils.
- Linux-based upgrade with prism2dl program, (which was part of linux-wlan project?)
- DOS-based upgrade.
This page only covers 1) and 2).
Raffaele Raf described DOS-based flashing experience in his "success story" series. (Thanks to Elias Tsigoyannis, you can read the file in pdf format) Here you can also find the original, my hand-edited raw text version.
Wim Osterhold forwarded an email to me that describes some DOS-based flashing experience. It looks cryptic to me, but may be useful to desparate souls.
Here is the link to an old binary for prism2dl on Linux/i386 machines. Pavel Roskin put slightly improved version of prism2dl at http://www.red-bean.com/~proski/prism2dl/. According to him, "It should be easier to use, but it's not _safer_ to use than the original version. In particular, it still allows flashing firmware intended for RAM download."
Earl has put up a note that describes using a bootable openap-ct floppy to do 2)-style upgrade. See the page at here. I have not tried it, but it sounds like a very attractive idea.
Note that this page only talks about upgrading primary firmware and station (secondary) firmware. URL: Jun Sun's mini-HOWTO on flashing Intersil Prism chipsets: http://linux.junsun.net/intersil-prism/
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