Socket CF driver, the Zaurus, and monitor mode

[Pavel Roskin]

> > Obviously, the spectrum_cs driver crashes or gets stuck in the middle of 
> > initialization.  I'll try to figure it out.

I could not reproduce this problem on kernel 2.4.19-pre7 with WE 14 patch
on Intel architecture.  Imitating your setup more closely would be too
much work compared to the expected result (most likely unrelated to
spectrum_cs and most likely already fixed).  You can add printk's on every
line in the driver and find where the driver crashes by looking at the
output of dmesg.

> The card is a prism2 card, right?  Only its firmware needs to be loaded
> at every powerup?

Yes.

> So what happens if I load the spectrum_cs driver, let it initialize
> the firmware, then do:
> 
> modprobe -r spectrum_cs orinoco hermes
> 
> modprobe prism2_cs

Chances are that the firmware will survive.  However, it doesn't survive 
e.g. after "cardctl suspend", so I'm not sure.

> The answer is that the little light on the card starts blinking, dmesg says:
> 
> init_module: prism2_cs.o: 0.1.12-shp Loaded
> init_module: dev_info is: prism2_cs
> 
> But there's no eth0 or wvlan0 or wlan0 or anything.  ifconfig -a just
> lists irda0, lo, usbd0.
> 
> But the blinking is encouraging.

I'm sorry, I don't have time to check it.  I know that if I use 
linux-wlan-ng with a newly inserted card, I get a very clear message in 
the kernel log that it failed to initialize.  You can check to see if 
there is any difference.

> What would it take to make some wlan-ng module work with this card?
> For now, I'm even happy with the "initialize it with spectrum_cs"
> trick, but I'll be tempted to make a better solution later.

It's quite simple to hook the loader to the linux-wlan-ng driver in the
initialization routine.  You get prism2_cs that depends on hermes, but
it's Ok for the test.  I did it once, and the driver could find the card
and report the firmware version.

However, linux-wlan-ng only works with Intersil firmware properly, so the
hard part would be to find Intersil firmware and convert it to
spectrum_fw.h.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin