WMP54g, ral(4) driver, & 7.0-RELEASE -- Thanks, question, & comments

[Sam Leffler]

Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:
> I just wanted to drop a line and say "Thanks!" to everybody who worked on
> getting support for the Linksys WMP54g v4/v4.1 (and the RT2561C chipset -
> now supported by the ral(4) driver) into 7.0-RELEASE.
>
> I'm a total wireless neophite, but after a modest amount of fiddling and
> Reading of the Fine Manual, this card... I have the v4.1 version... seems
> to be working great for me.  So thanks to all who had a hand in that.
>
> I do have one (or maybe two) small questions however.  It appears that
> if one has this card and one does an "ifconfig ral0 scan", that this scan
> will hang forever _unless_ there is something out there for the card to
> find, i.e. something it can talk to.  Is that by design, or did somebody
> just forget to slip in a timeout someplace?
>   

ifconfig issues a scan request and waits for an event indicating the 
scan has completed.  If it hangs then it didn't receive the event for 
some reason.  You haven't said how your card was setup or what state it 
was in so there's no way to guess what's going on.  wlandebug(8) can be 
used to see what's happening; e.g.

wlandebug -i ral0 scan

will send debug msgs to the console for scan operations.

> Also, I've seen this exact same "hang forever during a scan" behavior now
> in another context too, and it seems really weird... I can't explain it,
> and I hope that somebody else will take a stab at explaining it to me.  I have
> purchased a shiny new Linksys WRT54G router to keep my shiny new Linksys
> WMP54g wireless PCI card company, and strangly/inexplicably, it seems that
> if I configure the router for either "WPA Personal" or "WPA2 Personal"
> security _and_ then also select just "AES" rather than the other choice,
> which is "TKIP+AES", then in this case also, doing an "ifconfig ral0 scan"
> back on the machine with the WMP54g card in it seems to hang forever.  Does
> anybody have any idea why that might happen?
>
> It's no big deal.  The obvious workaround is just to leave "TKIP+AES" set
> on the WRT54G all of the time, and that seems to work fine.
>   

Again, no logs, no way of answering.  It's possible your AP doesn't 
offer AES only TKIP so the scan continued looking for an AP that matches 
the requirements you set out.  A log from wpa_supplicant would likely 
tell you what's happening.

>
> Now that I've gotten my question out of the way, a few comments.  I'm
> providing these in the hope sthat they may perhaps help some other
> wireless neophites who, like me, are just getting started with wireless
> stuff.
>
> Firstly, to any of you other folks out there who are just getting ready to
> buy components, and who want to do some wirless networking with FreeBSD,
> allow me to suggest that you _not_ buy an ASUS WL-138G.  These are currently
> available from Newegg, and are pretty inexpensive (about $19 bucks) but
> (as I learned _after_ I bought one) the chipset of those is a Marvell
> chipset, and thus, the thing ain't directly supported by BSD.  You gotta
> use a clever kludge... it's very clever, but its still a kludge... called
> "ndiswrapper" to get BSD to talk to the Marvell chipset.  And under that
> approach, you're basically using a (non-open) Windoze driver for the chipset
> which gets magically wedged into BSD (or Linux) via the magic of ndiswrapper.
>   

Depends which Marvell part.  There's a driver in HEAD that will get 
MFC'd not to long from now to support the 8335 part.  If this card uses 
the "Libertas" chipset then there's no driver right now but we could do 
one as Marvell has publicized how to program these parts and we have a 
good relationship with them.

> All things considered, its better to get a card that has a chipset that's
> natively supported by your own kernel.  I'm sure that the ASUS WL-138G,
> like all ASUS products, is a fine product and a find card, but if anybody
> wants one, I happen to be selling one, cheap.
>
> As regards to the Linksys WMP54g (v4/v4.1) PCI wireless card... well... the
> kernel didn't even see it as being present under FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE, but
> thankfully, that has now been corrected, and under FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE the
> card seems to work just peachy.  Looking at all of the wireless-G PCI cards
> available at Newegg right now, this is certainly one of the less expensive
> ones (around $39 bucks as of this writing) so that fact that FreeBSD now
> supports it is really helpful.  (And, as you might expect, it seems to play
> well with the Linksys WRT54G router, which is also really inexpensive at
> Newegg right now... around $43 bucks.)
>
> That's all.  I hope thatthis infor will be helpful to others.
>
>
> Regards,
> rfg
>
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-net at freebsd.org mailing list
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-net
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-net-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
>
>
>