A bit late, but here is the first beta of the Option HSDPA driver for FreeBSD 8. It’s more or less completely rewritten and there are some visible changes to the interface.

Because ucom(4) has matured it can now be utilized instead of mucking around directly with the TTY layer. This results in that the device names in /dev has changed and are now longer called /dev/HSO*, instead they follow the standard ucom names of cuaU*.

The new USB stack attach USB devices per USB interface instead of per USB device, so it’s possible to get both a cuaU0 and cuaU1 device (instead of just cuaU0.0 and cuaU0.1). The number of found serial ports can be read through sysctl.

The packet interface is now exposed as a raw interface instead of emulating an Ethernet device (I seriously wonder why I did that…).

The driver switches automatically from install-cd mode to modem mode, there is no longer any need for manual switching through devd. Please remove the option-icon.conf file from your /usr/local/etc/devd directory.
This can be disabled by setting hw.usb.uhso.auto_switch to 0

And last, I’ve renamed the driver to uhso to reflect its USB nature.

Download: uhso-20091122.tar.gz – Add support for iCON 505, fix probing of devices with dynamic number of interfaces, add new custom attach messages based on the port type.

Download: uhsoctl-beta-20090820.tar.gz – uhsoctl connection utility, similar to old hsoctl

Download: uhso-beta-20090812.tar.gz – Minor bug fix and reworked sysctl nodes.

Download: uhso-beta-20090723.tar.gz – No longer PTP interface (completely useless), fixed (hopefully) CDC notification on modem port, added several new device IDs. Thanks to Iain Hibbert for this!

Download: uhso-beta-20090722.tar.gz – Bug fixes that should improve RX speed.

Download: uhso-beta-20090720.tar.gz

If you own an Option device, please leave a comment (or send a mail) with its full name and USB device ID.

I’m particularly interested in the following devices iCON 031, iCON 210, iCON 315, iCON 322, iCON 401, iCON 431, iCON 451, iCON 452, iCON 505.

If you’re running FreeBSD 8 and own an Option device, please mail me the output of

usbconfig -u X -a Y dump_device_desc
usbconfig -u X -a Y dump_all_config_desc

where X and Y (5 and 2 below) can be obtained through usbconfig

# usbconfig
...
ugen5.2: <Globetrotter HSDPA Modem Option N.V.> at usbus5, cfg=0 md=HOST spd=FULL (12Mbps) pwr=ON

This driver has been tested with a Globesurfer iCON 7.2, iCON 255, iCON 505

Quick setup for manual connection
uhsoctl works as before!

Look up the serial ports

# sysctl dev.uhso
dev.uhso.0.netif: uhso0
dev.uhso.0.type: Network/Serial
dev.uhso.0.ports: 2
dev.uhso.0.port.control.tty: cuaU0.0
dev.uhso.0.port.control.desc: Control
dev.uhso.0.port.application.tty: cuaU0.1
dev.uhso.0.port.application.desc: Application
...
dev.uhso.1.type: Serial
dev.uhso.1.ports: 1
dev.uhso.1.port.diagnostic.tty: cuaU1
dev.uhso.1.port.diagnostic.desc: Diagnostic

Open /dev/cuaU0.0 in a terminal application, for example minicom. Issue the following commands to establish a connection.

AT+CPIN="1234" # Your PIN
OK

AT_OWANCALL=1,1,1
OK

AT_OWANDATA=1
_OWANDATA: 1, 95.209.79.126, 0.0.0.0, 80.251.201.177, 80.251.201.178, 0.0.0.0, 0.0.0.0, 72000

If you haven’t configured a PDP context with your providers APN, please see the hso page.

Configure the interface and set a default route

# ifconfig uhso0 95.209.79.126
# route add default -interface uhso0

Changes to hso(4)

• Support for the new TTY layer, driver now works with 7.0 upto todays 8.0-CURRENT.
• Device IDs for Option GlobeTrotter HSUPA and Option GMT382 added.
• Minor performance and stability issues have been addressed.

Changes to hsoctl(1)

• hsoctl now forks into background upon a successful connection, the old behvaior can be obtained with -n flag. Disconnection is possible by executing hsoctl -d hso0.  While running in background, important information is logged to syslog.  Complete daemonization is also possible with the -b flag.
• Use of AT+CGREG in addition to AT+CREG to detect network registration (for service plans where voice calls are disabled).
• resolv.conf handling have been improved, only nameserver entries are changed, other content is left intact. A bug that sometimes caused garbled data to be prepended to resolv.conf have also been addressed.  The resolv.conf path can be altered with the -r flag, disable resolv.conf with -r /dev/null.
• hsoctl does now gracefully terminate upon unexpected device removal.
• Default route installation have been improved.

The code can be obtained from the hso page, the update should hit the ports tree soon (comms/hso-kmod).

Speed test from a rural location. Values are in bits/s, so that’s almost 300 kB/s downstream and around 40 kB/s upstream. Hopefully downstream is slightly better from a more urban location.

hso(4) speedtest

Existing users should note that hsod has been renamed to hsoctl and that the utility now properly updates resolv.conf.

Device IDs for the following devices have been added to the driver. However, this is completely untested, if you have any of these devices, please test and report if it works or not. Thank you.

• Option GlobeSurfer iCON HSUPA
• Option iCON 401

In addition to this I’ve published the first version of a connection utility (called hsod) that creates and maintains a UMTS/HSDPA connection and makes life a lot easier. The utility is still beta and requires some more work, for example I would like it to run in background so that it can be launched from devd when the interface is brought up (ifconfig hso0 up).

Both the driver and the connection utility can be found at the hso page.

The driver is available for download together with instructions at the hso page. Please report successes and failures.

The driver is called hso for now (same name as the linux driver). The card is not a “normal” 3G-modem in the sense that it’s not simply a serial-over-USB card. Instead it has several serial channels that accept the normal AT interface (signal strength, SMS, etc) and in addition to that a IP packet interface to which one reads and writes raw IP packets. The card is exposed through a simulated Ethernet device.

hso0: flags=1088c3<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,NOARP,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST,NEEDSGIANT>
   metric 0 mtu 1500
        ether 40:0c:e3:69:11:00
        inet 83.178.12.92 netmask 0xffffffff broadcast 83.178.12.92
        inet6 fe80::420c:e3ff:fe69:1100%hso0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x5

Currently it’s a bit annoying to setup a connection as it requires that one first opens a serial channels and issue AT_OWANCALL to create a connection and AT_OWANDATA to get the ip-address and nameservers and then manually configure the interface. It would be nice if this could be automated by the driver with the interface is brought up, however that would require the driver (and thus kernel) itself to read from its own serial channel…bit hackish but maybe it works

Finally, the output from the very first connections. This is a ping from my workstation to the computer connected through the card.

fli@nexus> ping 83.178.12.92
PING 83.178.12.92 (83.178.12.92): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 83.178.12.92: icmp_seq=0 ttl=56 time=446.203 ms
64 bytes from 83.178.12.92: icmp_seq=1 ttl=56 time=332.321 ms

And this is from the computer connected with the card

fli@genesis> ping ping.sunet.se
PING ping.sunet.se (192.36.125.18): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 192.36.125.18: icmp_seq=0 ttl=248 time=287.708 ms