U0107 Series Firmware

This page contains some notes specific to PCI card firmware version U0107 (and friends).

Software sources

The main difference between U0106 and U0107 software is that the kernel device driver was completely rewritten to enable a new communication protocol and to get away from the dependence on bigphysarea. This change is largely transparent to end users.

However, the "right version" of MAS must be installed to use U0107. Instead of trunk, get branches/driver_hacking/. Efforts are underway to merge this branch into trunk so that U0106 and U0107 can exist, more or less, side-by-side.

There is no special version of mce_script for U0107; old code should work as before.

Locking the kernel version

Since U0107+ firmware does not require the bigphysarea patch, the driver must be rebuilt and reinstalled whenever a new Linux kernel is activated. For now, the best way to avoid this is to avoid upgrading the kernel (note that this carries certain security risks). To "lock the kernel version", open the synaptic package manager:

sudo apt-get install synaptic
sudo syntaptic

Then find "linux-generic" in the package list. Select that entry, and then go the "Package" menu and select "Lock Version". That should turn the entry red, or something.

We may eventually implement DKMS [1] to have the driver rebuilt automatically upon kernel upgrade.