Re: status of at76-usb driver

[Kalle Valo <kalle.valo@iki.fi>]

Claudio <der.claudio@aon.at> writes:

> Hi!

Hello,

> Since my hardware stopped working properly due to a distro (ubuntu
> btw) upgrade and I was not able to quickly fix it

I'm sorry to hear this. Can you tell me what Ubuntu version and at76
hardware you have? I have Ubuntu running on one of my test laptops, I
could test it myself.

> I started investigating (again) in \"the case of at76-usb\" and read
> through this mailing-list, the wiki and had a look at the changes in
> the git tree. I am not sure if I understood everything correctly.
>
> Can anyone sum up what the current state for users of at76-usb devices
> is please?
>
> It seems like the working code has been removed from the kernel in
> order to rewrite it anywhere in the future and adapt it to this new
> mac80211 thing. Which means that currently users (like me) have to use
> an old version of linux (like 2.4.22) to make use of their devices.
> Hopefully I am wrong...

The current state is this:

A long time ago I started porting at76_usb to use mac80211, the IEEE
802.11 stack in Linux. It's still buggy, biggest problem is that for
some reason I have to replug the device constantly. I guess firmware
is crashing because of a driver bug, or something like that.
Unfortunately I haven't worked that much on the problem and haven't
been able to solve it yet. As soon as I get good enough stability I
will resubmit it to wireless-testing tree, but I'm not there quite
yet.

Fortunately Greg created staging tree some time ago and included the
original at76_usb driver to the tree:

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=tree;f=drivers/staging/at76_usb;hb=HEAD

So starting from 2.6.28 (please correct me if I'm wrong here) the
original (and working!) at76_usb driver should be included already in
the kernel, it's just up to the distributions to enable it.

Grep, I noticed that the TODO file in your tree doesn't mention
anything about my mac80211 port. I'll send you a patch fixing that.

Also I'm going to rename the mac80211 port to something else for just
to avoid the confusion with the original driver. Last thing I want to
see is having two in-tree drivers with identical names.

-- 
Kalle Valo