Pre-compiled binaries for Raspberry Pi - Discussion

[zeroby0]

I'm thinking of packaging Nexmon and Nexmon_CSI as pre-built binaries for Raspberry Pi, just like RT-AC86U. Cloning the ~700 mb Nexmon repository, and then compiling it on the Pi is really slow and time consuming. I don't know of the legal ramifications, but please don't sue us, we are trying to do good things :)

Currently I don't know exactly which files are required for CSI collection to work, so there's a lot of experimentation and messing around to do. So please don't expect to see any results any time soon. I'm expecting some progress during Feb 2022.

If I figure it all out, I'm also interested in creating a Debian PPA so people can get started on CSI collection with just apt install nexmon_csi. If any one reading this is interested or has insights, please add a comment below. I plan to start working on this from early January 2022.

[zeroby0]

Progress!

I've isolated the binaries (Which is just nexutil, makecsiparams, brcmfmac.ko, and brcmfmac43455-sdio.bin - I was expecting more files) and wrote a bunch of Bash scripts to completely automate the install: You'd just run a command and it would download and install the correct pre-compiled binaries (different binaries for different versions of kernel and Pi), or perform the multiple install steps (some of which require reboots) and compile from source without requiring user interaction at all.

It was written in Bash because I didn't know of an elegant way to run a bunch of commands (apt install tcpdump, git clone nexmon_csi) in Python (And subprocess.run doesn't preserve ENV across runs). But I found https://github.com/tmux-python/libtmux so I'm gonna re-write the installer in Python.

I have a Pi 4B, but it's doing another job, so I can only occasionally interrupt it to compile Nexmon_CSI for Pi 4B. And I have a Pi 3B+ that's not doing anything, so I'll be able to provide pre-compiled binaries for both the versions of Pi. I was considering crowd-sourcing the binaries and wrote the code to automate that, but since I can compile them myself now, I can ensure the binaries are free of malicious code.

I'm expecting it to be ready in a week or two.

[wanghe97]

Hi, I just start working on CSI with raspberry pi. I figure out that you have created a python version installation method at https://github.com/nexmonster/picsi. Which version are you recommended to use? Many thanks.