An enhanced Open Source Implementation to replace Qualcomm's QRCT
Mobile voice and data modem chipsets come with extensive calibration and configuration data sets usually provided by proprietary software tools and encoding formats. The Open Radio Calibration Toolkit (ORCT) aims to address some short-comings of the official Qualcomm Radio Calibration Toolkit which is used for most Qualcomm modems and futhermore seems not to be maintained anymore. This open source project can be therefore rather useful for Qualcomm licensees who like to stay with the very well established, stable and wide spread XML based generation process of mobile configuration data.
In this context mobile configuration data also known as non-volatile (NV) parameter set is encoded in a proprietary XML format which is transformed into a binary representation, also denoted as QCN file format. QCN stands for QPST content, an acronym for the Qualcomm Product Support Tool software suite. QPST includes a software download utility which allows to quickly install configuration data incrementally or to backup the overall calibration data which is already installed on a modem chip.
While this approach looks very attractive on paper, the actual implementation does not comply to recent needs. In example Voice over LTE (VoLTE) requires the definition of several URL addresses as ASCII character strings, but QRCT is not capable of processing ASCII data at all. QRCT is furthermore not capable of managing the representation of the more complex file system based parameter structures and instead presents these parameters as a big binary blob. It lacks also proper error handling and type checking. When a paramter is not exactly specified as expected, it is simply not written to the QCN output data. Last but not least QRCT is closed source and the program is exclusively available for the Windows platform. This is especially anoying within Android/Linux based build infrastructures since the QCN paramter sets need to be generated and tested outside the used build tool chain.
ORCT aims to fully replace QRCT's XML transformations. It is
- considered to be fully downard compatible to QRCT
- sits on the JVM and runs on all major platforms
- provides a consise functional implemenation of its core logic
- is deployed under the terms of the GNU General Public License
More recently the QCN file format is more and more replaced by the Mobile Binary Configuration (MBN) file format which is based on an ELF container format and thus more easier to process on a target platform. While MBN comes with friendlier compilation tools where parameters can be entered as clear text within an Excel sheet, there currently no tools to view the contents of an MBN file. For this reason we included a MBN parser which can be used to print out and diff an configuration for which only a MBN file is available.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY.
The software is written in the Clojure programming language which requires a Java virtual machine and some additional libraries for operation.
You need the clojure build tool leinignen for compilation. Download the lein script file from Github
$ cd ~/bin
$ wget http://github.com/technomancy/leiningen/raw/stable/bin/lein
$ chmod +x lein
and type
$ lein self-install
The following commands will generate and stand-alone jar file when executed from orct's project root directory:
$ lein uberjar
Refer also to Zef's Leiningen page for more specific information about build options.
The following command will start the generation of an qcn output file
$ java -jar orct-<xyz>-standalone.jar -s <schemafile.xml> -c <masterfile.xml> <outputfile.qcn>
The required arguments are:
- schemafile.xml: schema definition in QRCT's proprietary XML format, refer to samples/NvDefintion.xml
- masterfile.xml: main nv item defintion file, can include futher XML files
The application can be also started by the script script/orct. It is recommended to install this script together with orct's standalone jar file to one of the directories of the standard execution path e.g. /usr/local/bin or /usr/bin. This allows to invoke orct with a much shorted command line. The following snippets illustrate typical use cases. When setting the current working directory to orct/samples, they shall be all operational out of the box:
$ orct -s NvDefinition.xml -p sample.qcn # writes the content of sample.qcn to standard out
$ orct -s NvDefinition.xml -p Masterfile.xml # writes the content of Masterfile.xml to standard out
$ orct -s NvDefinition.xml -c Masterfile.xml test.qcn # compiles Masterfile.xml into test.qcn
$ orct -s NvDefinition.xml -d Masterfile.xml test.qcn # show the difference of Masterfile's and test's nv item setup
$ orct --help # prints help screen
The above diff-operation will deliver an empty set in this case. It requires the precense of the tool 'diff' which is found on most Unix platforms. The option -t allows to specify an alternative diff-tool e.g. meld, beyond & compare, etc.
This software stands under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence.
Thanks to all the giants whose shoulders we stand on. And the giants theses giants stand on... And special thanks to Rich Hickey (and the team) for Clojure. Really, thanks!
- Clojure: http://clojure.org
- Leiningen: https://github.com/technomancy/leiningen
Copyright © 2015 Otto Linnemann