[arch-dev-public] wireless modules up for grabs

[Thomas Bächler]

James schrieb:
>>> * ipw3945 - only needs to be maintained until iwl3945 is stable (not yet).
>> I use it on my laptop, so I could do it. I am also regularly testing
>> iwl3945.
> 
> Ok, you're more in touch with the kernel scene, so maybe it'd be
> better if you took it rather than neotuli?

Yes, if he agrees on that. I am hoping that iwl3945 will be usable when
2.6.22 is released, but I won't add replaces=('ipw3945') for it,
maintaining the two in parallel for a while.

>>> * tiacx - there's kernel patches in -mm, these are probably better as
>>> the external module is infrequently updated.
>> I have such a card (acx100, 802.11b), but I don't use it. I could use it
>> to test the card though. There are currently 3 drivers, legacy (from the
>> homapage), softmac (in -mm afaik, but I think it will not be maintained
>> anymore) and a mac80211 version. We need to find out which one works
>> best and which one we can built out-of-tree.
> 
> I tried to build the -mm one out of tree, and really didn't have much
> success. Currently we have the legacy in the repos, but we've got so
> few users of it, I've got no idea whether it works or not. The
> snapshot is from early this year, so i wouldnt be surprised if it was
> bust on newer kernels.

One user complained that it wasn't updated to 2.6.21, so I did the
update and he said it works.
We should definitely try the mac80211 or softmac one, as it has wpa support.

> Didnt even know about the mac80211 version.

Yeah, it should be merged in the wireless-2.6 tree soon.

>>> * rt2x00-* - will be in 2.6.22 from wireless-git?
>> rt2x00 development has been stalled for a while due to the main author
>> being busy with real life. The CVS port to built out-of-tree is always
>> out of date afaik, but the author suggested to me to use it anyway.
>> Maybe we can pull the code directly from the -git tree.
> 
> The CVS one hasnt been updated for ages since moving to git, and i
> think at one stage, it was intentionally broken to encourage a move to
> the git one...

http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=24033#24033
"CVS isn't under active maintainership,
but it now contains the rt2x00 version directly taken from GIT
(with some lag, since the updates are done on a irregular basis) and it
contains no backward compatibility code for older kernels."

That means we can use CVS with 2.6.22 again, unless wireless-2.6 has
some serious changes compared to 2.6.22.

>> The driver won't merge before 2.6.24 as far as I see the situation
> 
> damn. i was hoping to see that one in so we could drop the external
> packages and not worry about it.

There are still major problems with the driver. See IvD's TODO list in
the rt2x00 wiki.

> Maybe we ought to backport mac80211+drivers to 2.6.22? That'll give us
> the newest tiacx and rt2x0. Fedora backported it to 2.6.21 for Fedora
> 7, so it's not unreasonable.

mac80211 should be quite up to date in 2.6.22. Backporting drivers would
be quite a task, and I am not sure if I can do it, but it seems worth
looking at.


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