An introduction to libqmi

What is QMI?

QMI is a binary protocol designed to replace the AT command based communication with modems, and is available in devices with Qualcomm chipsets from multiple vendors (Novatel, Huawei, Sierra Wireless, ZTE… and of course Qualcomm itself).

The protocol defines different ‘services‘, each of them related to different actions that may be requested to the modem. For example, the ‘DMS’ (Device Management) service provides actions to load device information; while the ‘NAS’ (Network Access) service provides actions to register in the network. Similarly, other services will allow the user to request data connections (WDS), setup GPS location reporting (PDS), or manage internals of the user identity module (UIM service). The user needs to handle the creation of ‘clients’ for those services by allocating/deallocating ‘client IDs’ using the generic always-on ‘control’ (CTL) service.

Each service in the protocol defines ‘Request and Responses‘ as well as ‘Indications‘. Each pair of request/response has a maching ID which lets the user concatenate multiple requests and get out-of-order responses that can be afterwards matched through the common ID. Indications arrive as unsolicited messages, sent either to a specific client or as a broadcast message to all the clients of a given service. Usually the user needs to request the enabling of the indications to receive via some request/response.

Finally, each message in the protocol defines a set of input (in requests) and output (in responses and indications) arguments, which we name as TLVs. Some of these are defined to be mandatory, others are optional, and others are only mandatory if some other argument is available and has a given value. For example, some output arguments in response messages are only mandatory if the result of the response (given as a TLV) is SUCCESS.

 

Using the QMI protocol

This protocol is easily accessible in recent enough Linux kernels (>= 3.4), through the cdc-wdm and qmi_wwan drivers. Once these drivers are in place and the modem gets plugged in, the kernel will expose a new /dev/cdc-wdm device which can talk QMI, along with a wwan interface associated to each QMI port.

 

libqmi

libqmi is an on-going effort to get a library providing easy access to Qualcomm’s ‘QMI’ protocol. The current libqmi available is based on the GLib/GObject/GIO-powered ‘libqmi-glib’. libqmi tries to ease the use of the protocol by providing:

• A ‘QmiDevice‘ object to control the access to the /dev/cdc-wdm device. This object allows creating new per-service ‘QmiClient’s. It also hides the use of the implicit ‘CTL’ service client.
• The ‘QmiClient‘ object provides an interface to the set of request/responses of a given service. Users of the library will just need to execute a GIO-asynchronous method to send the request and get the processed response.
• The ‘QmiClient‘ object also provides signals for each of the indications given in the service.
• The input and output arguments needed in requests, responses and indications are compiled into ‘bundles’. These bundles are opaque structs with accessors for their elements, which allow us to add new TLVs to a given message in the future without breaking API/ABI.

The protocol is written in the library as a JSON dictionary of rules, and most of the code to handle the protocol in the library is autogenerated during compilation. If you want to take a look at the currently available interface, check the (work in progress) gtk-doc documentation at: http://www.lanedo.com/~aleksander/libqmi/html

 

qmicli

The libqmi project comes with a command line utility (qmicli) primarily used as a developer tool for testing the libqmi-glib library. Just run the program with ‘--help-all‘ to get all possible actions it can run. A quick example of usage:

$> sudo qmicli -d /dev/cdc-wdm0 --dms-get-manufacturer
[/dev/cdc-wdm0] Device manufacturer retrieved:
Manufacturer: 'Qualcomm Incorporated'


Hint: If you compile the project passing -DMESSAGE_ENABLE_TRACE to CFLAGS, it will dump as DEBUG logs the content and translation of all the QMI messages passed in both directions. You’ll also need ‘--verbose‘ or just ‘-v‘ to show the debug logs when running qmicli.

 

Other utilities

The project also comes with a small bash script called ‘qmi-network‘, which allows you to launch a broadband connection using libqmi-glib and qmicli. This script requires two arguments; first the cdc-wdm device to talk to, and secondly the action (start|stop|status) to execute. The script can definitely be improved in multiple ways (e.g. send PIN), so if anyone wants to do it patches are very welcome.

 

Where do I get it?

The project is currently available in the freedesktop.org infrastructure:

• git: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libqmi
• mailing list: http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libqmi-devel
• bugzilla: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/buglist.cgi?product=libqmi

 

ModemManager

Last but not least, the beloved ModemManager is getting improved with QMI support through libqmi-glib. If you want to give it a try (still work in progress), just grab the ‘qmi-support’ branch in the upstream ModemManager repository.

 
Enjoy it!

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