Hi folks,
We've had a number of reports of the compat-wireless package being
broken on EL 6.3.
I've now had time to spend a couple days looking into this so wanted to
take the opportunity to update where we are on this and decide if it's
worth pursuing.
Basically, compat-wireless is an effort by the compat-wireless project
to backport the wireless branch of drivers from the latest kernel to
earlier kernels. The elrepo project merely packages this effort for RHEL6.
As of kernel 3.3 they (compat-wireless) added support for RHEL6 which is
based upon a 2.6.32 kernel. Although the 2.6.32 kernel is well supported
in compat-wireless, the RHEL6 kernel is far from standard and over time
it's divergence from the base 2.6.32 kernel grows as Red Hat backport
more stuff into it.
Anyway, with release 3.3, compat-wireless added support for RHEL 6.2 and
we released our package on that basis.
Subsequent compat-wireless releases (3.4, 3.5) were again broken on
RHEL, and the release of RHEL 6.3 has broken our package due to the
amount of new wireless support Red Hat has backported.
So where does this leave us?
Firstly, folks should try uninstalling kmod-compat-wireless on 6.3 and
see if the new wireless features in 6.3 supports your device. If the 6.3
kernel supports your device then you should use that.
Secondly, I have now managed to patch our original package based on
compat-wireless 3.3.2 sufficiently to get it to build on 6.3. Some
drivers should work, but there are still a lot of drivers in the package
that will be broken. The issue here is I see no warnings during build,
only once I've built the package and attempt to load individual drivers
- also keep in mind I don't have any wireless hardware to test these with.
So, if people are desperate I could release the semi-broken package I
have and it might/might not work for you. If it doesn't work (and
assuming it worked on 6.2), feel free to report it and I can then look
at drivers on an individual basis.
I realise that all of this is far from ideal. This is not really our
(elrepo's) problem. This needs to be fixed by the compat-wireless
project but I suspect that fully supporting a moving target like the
RHEL kernel is providing them with major headaches, and having tried to
fix this myself I can appreciate just what a task it is for them!
So, if anyone is interested in running with this, let me know and I'll
submit my patches to date to our github repo and get us started, but I'm
not sure this is something I want to undertake by myself (some help
would be nice!).
Otherwise we drop compat-wireless unless the compat-wireless project are
able to sort out the issues supporting the RHEL kernel. To this end,
I'll ping their email list and see what their long terms goals are.
Thanks,
Phil
_______________________________________________
elrepo mailing list
elrepo@lists.elrepo.org
http://lists.elrepo.org/mailman/listinfo/elrepo
