ral(4) on 8-RC1

[Sam Leffler]

Matt Dawson wrote:
> Odd little issue just cropped up on my lappie running 8.0-RC1 amd64. On 7.2 
> the ral(4) wireless NIC (2560 1st gen mini-PCI) gave me the Japanese 
> regulatory domain allocations (2.412GHz to 2.477GHz, 14 channels) on 
> 802.11g. I understand a lot has changed with 802.11 on 8, but I can now 
> only ever get 2.412-2.462GHz channels 1 to 11. It's not a huge issue right 
> now as my own AP is within that range, but I may run into problems using 
> open access WiFi on the go sometime in the future, with being in the UK 
> (ETSI) and all that.
> 
> wlan0 is set up in rc.conf like this:
> 
> wlans_ral0="wlan0"
> ifconfig_wlan0="country GB regdomain ETSI protmode off WPA DHCP"
> 
> Taking the interface down and tweaking ifconfig's regdomain and related 
> options makes no difference. I still only end up with 11 channels no matter 
> what I try. Booting from 6.3 (DSBSD over PXE) lists, yet again, 14 channels 
> when I use ifconfig ral0 list chans. Ifconfig lists the correct country and 
> regdomain, so I'm stumped. I do get the "ral0: need multicast update 
> callback" warning, but I'm led to believe that this is harmless.

ral probably does not populate it's initial channel list according to 
the device capabilities.  I'm guessing it falls back on the system code 
to do that and it fills in only channels 1-11.  This means future 
changes to regulatory cannot setup the channels you want--it's not 
allowed to add channels that are not listed in the "device capabilities".

> 
> ral0 at pci0:2:4:0: class=0x028000 card=0x614618e8 chip=0x02011814 rev=0x01 
> hdr=0x00
> vendor='Ralink Technology, Corp'
> device='Ralink Chipset 802.11b/g WLAN card ( 
> PCIVEN_1814&DEV_0201&SUBSYS_68331460&REV_013&)'
> class=network
> cap 01[40]=powerspec 2 supports D0 D3 current D0
> 
> Any ideas? Anything else I can do to check the card? Anything else I should 
> have included? I also have a 2561 based Gigabyte GN-WI01GS (also ral) and 
> an iwi(4) 2915 dual band card to test with (and no silly BIOS limitations 
> to stop me, thank $DEITY), but I've had zero luck with iwi on amd64, hence 
> the Ralink card. Last time I tried iwi, the default build (7.1 IIRC) didn't 
> build the module or its firmware (I did have the license ack in 
> loader.conf) and I had to faff about connecting the module to the build, 
> which wasn't pleasant and didn't work anyway (no results from scan, no 
> association with my AP despite working perfectly on i386 with the same 
> config).

You can hack ral to setup a proper channel list at attach or you can 
make a private hack to net80211 to populate the channel list w/ those 
channels you want.  Either is simple.

	Sam