ral(4) on 8-RC1

[Matt Dawson]

On Saturday 03 Oct 2009 19:28:50 you wrote:
> 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".

That makes sense. Given that my 2561 card has "ETSI" stamped on its label, 
one would think it's the card's job to report to the driver what it 
supports. If the driver doesn't request this, the safest bet is the lowest 
common denominator that should be legal everywhere, 11 channels at FCC 
spec. Got it.

Just a quick question, if I may: Are the maxpower specs of regdomain.xml in 
dBm?  ETSI is max 20dBm ERP at 2.4GHz. Euro spec cards are only capable of 
~100mW anyway, most more like 60mW and your average foot of RG-174 will 
knock nearly a dB off at 2.4GHz, so it hardly matters, but I'm curious. The 
manpage doesn't specify what the fields mean.

> 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.
 
Thank you. I'll probably try the local hack for now, but hacking ral (and 
probably iwi now I finally have that working, which does exactly the same 
thing) to do the right thing would be a better long-term solution.

To the list: Does anyone have any idea why the iwi firmware modules build 
by default on i386 and not on amd64? I know from experience that manually 
building them on 7.1 amd64 didn't work, but it now works well on 8 except 
for the messages about mcast/promisc update separation.
-- 
Matt Dawson
MTD15-RIPE