Re: [GIT]: Networking

Linus Torvalds
2008-08-06T06:18:53Z

On Wed, 6 Aug 2008, Marcel Holtmann wrote:
>
> 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.

Yeah, the rfkill literally makes the chip go away from the PCI lists, it
seems. But your problems can certainly be somehow driver-related, I
haven't actually _tested_ that thing at all, I got the machine just as the
merge window started, so I've had no time to even play with it.

> 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. :(

Well, it's also trying to support both 2.4.x and 2.6 etc. Yeah, that is
horrid. At the same time, I can't say that the "rewrite it entirely"
approach of the previous-gen cards has worked very well either, since that
seems to have just perpetuated the problems. It would be great to try to
educate them, but I'm not finding even an email address in the sources.

Oh well. I can't really complain, since just the fact that they bothered
to even make sources available still makes them pretty responsible people,
even if the sources are pretty dang ugly.

All the capitalization etc makes me think they are all old DOS and Windows
programmers. UCHAR and USHORT indeed, along with CamelCase functions.

I dunno.

Linus