"We can't just kill -HUP ," Sam groaned. "We have to serialize TR-181 parameters into D-Bus method calls."
Mira discovered that the RDK-B wifi-agent would write to a hostapd.conf file, then send SIGHUP. But the QCA SoC, being non-native, didn't run a standard hostapd – it ran a custom wpa_supplicant with a D-Bus API. rdk-b integration with non-native wi-fi socs
They wrote a Python daemon, qca-bridge-d , that listened to Redis (where RDK-B caches its data model), translated Device.WiFi.SSID.1.Enable into dbus-send --system --dest=org.qualcomm.wpa /org/qualcomm/wpa/1 org.qualcomm.wpa.SetEnable boolean:true . "We can't just kill -HUP ," Sam groaned
Mira shrugged. "The stack doesn't care about vendor loyalty," she said. "It only cares about the abstraction. Build a good enough bridge, and any chip can sing RDK-B's song." They wrote a Python daemon, qca-bridge-d , that
But the real pain was – 802.11k/v/r. RDK-B's steering-daemon relied on Broadcom's proprietary bsd (Band Steering Daemon) ioctls. The QCA chip used RRM (Radio Resource Management) beacons and the iw command for BSS transition management.
, the log screamed.
The lab in Cupertino hummed with a familiar tension. On the bench lay two pieces of silicon that were never meant to talk to each other. One was the brain: a Broadcom BCM3390 system-on-chip (SoC), the native heart of the RDK-B stack. The other was a rebel: a Qualcomm QCA6391 Wi-Fi 6E SoC, plucked from a high-end laptop reference design. The mission, given by a Tier-1 operator named "Axiom Broadband," was simple in ask but monstrous in complexity: integrate the alien Wi-Fi chip into the RDK-B gateway as the sole access point.