Aleksander Morgado
bd255849dc
There is no guarantee from the kernel that the ports of a given device will all be notified via uevents on a timely manner. We assume it, but we cannot be completely sure. There are two main scenarios that we have been seen when the ports of a device are not notified close enough to each other: * A modem object is created, but not with the desired control protocol. E.g. a QMI or MBIM modem would end up controlled via AT commands if the cdc-wdm port was added too late. * A modem object is not created at all, and the device object was removed completely. E.g. when the net port addition in a QMI or MBIM modem happens too late. In order to avoid those cases, we will now fully reprobe all the ports of the device from scratch whenever a new valid port addition happens after the initial probing of the device has already been completed. If a modem object is available at that time, we will remove it right away.
ModemManager
ModemManager provides a unified high level API for communicating with mobile broadband modems, regardless of the protocol used to communicate with the actual device (Generic AT, vendor-specific AT, QCDM, QMI, MBIM...).
Using
ModemManager is a system daemon and is not meant to be used directly from the command line. However, since it provides a DBus API, it is possible to use 'dbus-send' commands or the new 'mmcli' command line interface to control it from the terminal. The devices are queried from udev and automatically updated based on hardware events, although a manual re-scan can also be requested to look for RS232 modems.
Implementation
ModemManager is a DBus system bus activated service (meaning it's started automatically when a request arrives). It is written in C, using glib and gio. Several GInterfaces specify different features that the modems support, including the generic MMIfaceModem3gpp and MMIfaceModemCdma which provide basic operations for 3GPP (GSM, UMTS, LTE) or CDMA (CDMA1x, EV-DO) modems. If a given feature is not available in the modem, the specific interface will not be exported in DBus.
Plugins
Plugins are loaded on startup, and must implement the MMPlugin interface. It consists of a couple of methods which tell the daemon whether the plugin supports a port and to create custom MMBroadbandModem implementations. It most likely makes sense to derive custom modem implementations from one of the generic classes and just add (or override) operations which are not standard. There are multiple fully working plugins in the plugins/ directory that can be used as an example for writing new plugins. Writing new plugins is highly encouraged! The plugin API is open for changes, so if you're writing a plugin and need to add or change some public method, feel free to suggest it!
License
The ModemManager and mmcli binaries are both GPLv2+. The libmm-glib library is LGPLv2+.
Code of Conduct
Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms, which you can find in the following link: https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/CodeOfConduct
CoC issues may be raised to the project maintainers at the following address: modemmanager-devel-owner@lists.freedesktop.org