[orbit-user] madwifi driver

[Luis R. Rodriguez]

On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 3:47 PM, Rajesh Mahindra <rmahindra at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks Luis. Is the ath5k driver stable?

Rajesh,

For the AR5212 hardware we have it is, and if you see a crash please
let me know. However please keep in mind there are a few things still
completely unimplemented in ath5k. If you need reliable control of
power, for example, then ath5k is not for you yet. Also if you need
Master (AP) mode ath5k is not for you yet. If these are not a concern
to you I'd advise to use ath5k. If you want to still hack on MadWifi
you can use the same information ath5k makes available (like the one I
pasted) and use that to write to the same register within MadWifi.
Either way you can always use the latest baseline image [1] to hack on
both drivers. This image has both MadWifi and ath5k available. If you
want the kernel headers already installed be sure to use
baseline-8.3-dev.ndz, we don't have them on baseline-8.3.ndz to save
space. Switching between ath5k and MadWifi is just a matter of
calling:

athload madwifi
athload ath5k

Also if you want to hack on ath5k from the node itself you can do so
easily using our latest baseline. The /misc/src/ is a NFS automount to
commonly used source code experimenters may rely upon. We take
advantage of this and keep a wireless-testing.git repository there
updated daily to reflect upstream. With the compat-wireless package
installed on the baseline you can now easily get the latest updates by
taking the following steps:

cd /usr/src/compat-wireless-2.6/
# Get the latest compat-wireless-2.6 changes first
git-pull
# Now lets pull the latest changes from our local GIT_TREE on the NFS directory
./scripts/admin-update.sh
# If we want to try to hack on any drivers or mac80211 we can do so now
# HACK HACK HACK
# Once you are done compile the wireless subsystem
make
# Finally install it
make install
# Now to load your drivers, first you must unload your current
wireless subsystem drivers
make unlaod
# Now load the driver you need, whether it be ath5k, or ipw2200
modprobe ath5k
modprobe ipw2200

And lastly note that ath5k is scheduled for inclusion in the next
release of the kernel (2.6.25) so I suspect MadWifi driver to die out
soon at least for our AR5212 purposes as we figure out more items that
need implementation. My advice is to stick and focus on ath5k if you
can afford to as you may have to soon anyway.

Hope this helps,

[1] http://orbit-lab.org/wiki/Documentation/SupportedImages/baseline-8.3.ndz

  Luis