Annother Wireless network card annother problem

[Oliver Fromme]

Gregory Bond <gnb at itga.com.au> wrote:
 > I use a Dlink DWL-520 PCI card with the wi driver and this works just fine.  I
 > currently use it as a base station (HOSTAP mode) but it also works as a client
 > (using an Apple base station) or in Ad-Hoc mode.  I've also used the DLink 
 > DWL-650 PCMCIA card in a laptop which also works fine.  These two cards use 
 > the "Prism2.5" chipset and any other Prism2.5-based cards should work as well.

Unfortunately, that's not the case.  A friend of mine bought
an SMC 2632 recently.  It is even listed in the wi(4) manpage,
but doesn't work with FreeBSD (works fine with Windows, so
the card isn't broken).  It's recognized, but doesn't work.
When I inserted a WaveLan card of mine into his notebook for
testing purposes, it worked fine, too, so his hardware and
PCMCIA setup are alright.  My guess is that SMC changed some
details in the hardware of their cards without changing the
name of the product (why should they -- it ships with a
driver for Windows, so everyone should be happy ...  not).

 > NB: the (very similar-sounding) DWL-520+ and DWL-650+ (22Mbps) parts are _not_
 > the same.  They are not Prism2.5 based, and I have no idea if they work in 
 > FreeBSD at all.

All 22Mbps cards are based on a TI chipset, for which there
is no documentation available (apparently not even under NDA),
so consequently FreeBSD doesn't support it.

Regards
   Oliver

PS:  Yeah, hardware sucks.  And hardware vendors suck.

-- 
Oliver Fromme, secnetix GmbH & Co KG, Oettingenstr. 2, 80538 München
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and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of secnetix in any way.

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