Chapter 4. HSF

4.1. History

A HSF driver first appeared out of the blue in mid-2000 when Olitec released unto the world a binary only driver for their Olitec PCI modem for 2.2.14 kernel, it didn't take long until someone realized that the Olitec modem was based on the Rockwell/Conexant HSF Chipset. Enquirers to Olitec revealed that the driver should work with any HSF chipset as there was nothing specific to the Olitec drivers. Many people tried to get the driver to work with non-Olitec modem unfortunately without success, however a few months later and after many hours of work by many people trying a variety of tricks to get the driver to work, several people managed to stumble across the solution. It was a simple one line change to file which solved the problem and the world was left with a working HSF driver, at the time it only worked on 2.2.14 Kernels and Olitec had refused to release the source code to let others try to get it to work with other kernels.

A few months later Olitec released the driver for 2.2.16 and 2.2.17 kernels, this kept the HSF winmodem community satisfied until we came to the day when the 2.4 kernel was released. None of the previous drivers appeared to work with the 2.4 kernel and this caused problems for all those who wanted to upgrade and also the waterfall of new users who were using 2.4.* kernel based distributions such as Mandrake 8 and RedHat 7.1. Not a word had been heard out of Olitec since the 2.4 kernel was released, but Conexant had announced that they intended to develop a Linux driver. After many months of waiting for a 2.4.* kernel Marc Boucher decided to something about it and wrote a wrapper which allowed an old version of the driver to be used with 2.4.* kernels.

That's where we are now, Marc's wrapper is still in experimental development stage but it works and many people are using it to connect to the internet under Linux.

From the history you'll understand why the next section has to be split into two sections one for 2.2.14 - 2.2.18 kernels and one for 2.4.* kernels. If you don't know what kernel version you have you can find out by using the 'uname -r' command at the console window before proceeding to the appropriate section of this HOWTO.