Questions regarding wlan, ipw and project evil

[Hans Nieser]

Hello,

I have been trying to get my Intel PRO/Wireless 2100 NIC working with WPA 
with FreeBSD 6.0-RELEASE, but am left with a few questions that I couldn't 
find clear answers to.

- It seems that when I put ipw in my kernel instead of loading it as a 
module, it won't will not attach to my NIC (no ipw0 to be found in my 
dmesg). When I load ipw as a module however it does attach to my NIC as 
ipw0. Is this normal? As the module seems to work ok, it doesn't really 
pose a problem but it does make me wonder.

- Somewhat similar as my question above (except that it's the other way 
around), I wanted to move wlan/wlan_* from my kernel to modules (so I 
could keep all the wifi stuff together in one place), but it seems I can't 
load "wlan" as a module. Putting wlan_load="YES" in my loader.conf doesn't 
make it load on boot nor can I manually load it with kldload wlan (it says 
"File exists"), it's not there when I do kldstat, but it's definitely not 
in my kernel either. Does wlan _have_ to be in the kernel? The wlan_* 
modules do load fine, by the way.

- I read on the website of the author of the ipw driver that it doesn't 
support WPA, is this still true and if so, is there any chance of it 
eventually supporting it, or should I just go out and get a NIC that does 
work with WPA under FreeBSD 6.0? Does Project Evil support WPA? or does it 
depend on the ndis driver used?