Re: [GIT]: Networking

From: Marcel Holtmann
Date: Wed Aug 06 2008 - 01:59:59 EST


Hi Linus,

There was going to be the addition of the ath9k wireless driver but
there was some fallout that is being worked on right now (linux/ list.h
changes needed lkml review, ath9k driver triggered some gcc aborts,
all kinds of fun stuff :-) so hopefully it will make it in the next
pass. I tried to wait an extra day for it to be resolved, but that
was optimistic.

Talking about wireless driver updates - has anybody looked at the RaLink
wireless driver? It's in the newer EeePC's (901 and 1000), and it
actually has a driver from the company which the comments make clear is
GPLv2 too, no apparent oddness or anything:

http://www.ralinktech.com.tw/data/drivers/2008_0708_RT2860_Linux_STA_v1.7.0.0.tar.bz2

which admittedly apparently has some trivial problems (with a trivial
patch as seen at

http://fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=195429

I'd love to have that one working, since I have the hardware, and it's
actually reasonable (much more so than the original EeePC, in fact). What
channels should I go through? Is anybody working on integrating it
already?

I looked at the driver and got it working. However my 901 seems to have an issue with the antennas. I can do scans, but associating with an access point or even thinking about transmit keeps failing. Even with external antennas this still doesn't work. So either my EeePC is broken or it needs some ACPI magic to enable it. Personally I think mine is broken since the PCIe hotplug stuff works for the wireless card and that seems to be their way of doing the rfkill.

The driver itself is painful. It is full of ifdefs and some crazy build magic. The integrated (to some degree optional) WPA code is pretty ugly. It has also a full set of iwpriv commands to do all the settings etc. :(

Regards

Marcel

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