wi driver

[Peter Lazar]

Hi there,

After reading

  http://forums.freebsd.org/archive/index.php/t-27830.html

Here's my two cents on the wi driver.

I tried/tested the wi driver with the following PCMCIA cards:

  Lucent Orinoco Gold (also known as: Lucent WaveLAN)

  SENAO 2511CD PLUS EXT2

On two different laptops:

  Dell LS400

  IBM T42

With the following FreeBSD RELEASE versions:

  7.4 (and 7.2)

  8.2

  9.0

On a home wireless network off Linksys WRT54G.

I find as follows:

1.
Both cards work on 7.4 and 7.2

2.
Both cards fail to work correctly on 8.2, and on 9.0.

after:
ifconfig wlan0 create wlandev wi0
ifconfig wlan0 ssid xxxx wepmode on weptxkey 1 wepkey 0xxxxx up

command
ifconf wlan0
shows there is either no association, or ssid is empty ("").

and, as expected, attempt to "dhclient wi0" fails.

3.
When inserted, on a laptop with either 8.2 and 9.0,
Lucent Orinoco gives the following console message:

  interrupt storm detected on "irq11:" throttling interrupt source
wi0: <Lucent Technologies WaveLAN/IEEE> at port 0x100-0x13f irq11 function 0 config 1 on pccard1
wi0: [ITHREAD]

on LS400, it is irq10
on T42, it is irq11

Lastly, here's my conclusion:

1.
prior to introduction of "wlan" (generic link-layer),
wi driver works as desired.

2.
on and after introduction of "wlan", wi driver does not work.

Regards,

Peter Lazar
Mountain View, CA, U.S.A. 
pgl at bok.net