Hi,

in opensuse 10.3 module ipw2200.ko is missing. I tried to use it with DENX and Gentoo, but it does not seems to work at all.

Does anybody knows if the driver is compatible with powerpc platforms?

Thank You

Giammarco

It probably isn't, but I have no idea how we would actually test this reliably.

I actually have a spare 2915 (and two 2200BG) MiniPCI card, if I can find a way to hook it up to my Efika I can have a look. But problem is probably as simple as an endianness issue - older versions were hopelessly broken in this regard. Using a later SuSE might fix it - since it will use a later driver. In the meantime, what version of the ipw2200 driver are you running, which firmware (2.x or 3.x) are you using, and did you build anything yourself?

What errors are you actually seeing?

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Matt Sealey

ipw2200 module works with my 2915 on opensuse 10.3. I downloaded latest compat-wireless package and left Efika compiling it at nighttime (please do not denounce me for abuse!!!). I just gave it a try and it seems to work.

I fear it is not a driver issue, as the same package compiled with DENX gave me strange errors, first giving error -2 on firmware loading (after freezing for more than a minute), then, after applying this patch, something like:

ipw2200: Detected geography (0 802.11bg channels, 0 802.11a channels)

which IMHO seems to be a screwed firmware or a drunk pci.

The board wasn't obviously responding to any ioctl.

Gentoo with 2.6.19 showed similar behaviour.

I suspect that there is some hotplug/firmware-helper issue with this, but as it is not SuSE related, this is almost off-topic. Never mind. Luckily, chameleon guys know how to tame the power(ful)pc beast.

Thanks a lot.

Giammarco

P.S. Is there a way to detect endianness problems in drivers (apart from diff)? I need to fix a quite old rt2x00 release.

Good. Don't worry. I compile kernels on my Efika. It takes 10 hours from "make" to having a zImage.
Well, I would like to know what the real problem is here. It is probably a firmware problem. As for SuSE, ipw2200 is going to be in the 11.0 SuSE kernel (along with rt2x00, hooray!) since they all got mainlined with the stablization of the new 802.11 stack. If they don't work on PowerPC for some reason we can tell them not to build them to the kernel and save some time and space and effort ;)
The only way to tell is to know what data it expects, and see what data it gets - or know what data it wants, and cross reference the data you're giving it.

ipw2200 got a lot of "endian fixes" over the months and years, but who knows if they all got caught. I have never seen anyone mention that they got it working on anything but a Centrino laptop..

This code makes me shiver though;


Why are they converting Little Endian microcode data to CPU endian format for loading into a ROM which the *device* needs? What bearing does the CPU endian format have here?

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Matt Sealey

Peter tells me that ipw2200 doesn't even work on x86 right now on the SuSE Factory builds, so, we can chalk this down to being hopelessly broken and not our fault for using another CPU :)

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Matt Sealey