Hello,
today, I wasted tons of money (from my perspective) ... First, I bought
a D-Link DWL-G650. Turns out it was revision C with an AR5213 on it ...
the driver complained about the RF radio not being supported. After lots
of whining in the store, I got to replace it with a Netgear WG511T.
Before breaking any seals of the packaging, I called Netgear tech
support to ask for what they built into this card, with s/n
foo-blah-bar. Turns out they couldn't tell, really, so I asked whether
there are any different revisions of that card, i.e. whether it ever
changed. They say "no, it's been always the same" and I figured that was
good enough. Oh well, I thought wrong. Same AR5213, same unsupported RF
radio. ARGH! No way I'm going to be able to get this one replaced, with
broken seals in the package.
It seems that it's virtually impossible to get a working/supported
wireless card these days ... damn those vendors who change hardware
without notice, and damn Netgear for lying to me. :-(( And not to
mention that useless, new wireless bridge that is doing nothing ... at
least it has 3 shiny blue LEDs.
Now I figured, what the hell; let's try and make it supported. My
wishful thinking and simply cranking the supported revisions of ath(4)
allowed the driver to attach, but that's as far as it goes. I can mess
around with ifconfig, setting any channel other than 6 isn't possible
and I'm getting "this should not happen"-errors.
Since I was too stupid to save the kernel output earlier, it's now
garbled ... impressive, how stuff in memory survives power-cycles in
dmesg (all the numbers are okay, otherwise I wouldn't bother pasting this:)
"A4heros C/mmunications, In\M-c., AR5001-0000-0000, Wireless LAN
Reference Card"
: irq 11
ath0: AR5213 7.9 phy 4.5 rf2112a 5.6 FCC2A*, address 00:0f:b5:ef:5e:a0
ath0: device timeowt
ar5k_ar5212_nic_wakeup: failed to resume |he AR5212 (acain)
avh0: Unable to reset h\M-ardware; hal status 3671035180
ath0: device timeowt
[...]
:-)
My experimentation did some weird stuff to OpenBSD, which is why I'm
running a sane kernel again.
Anyways, I'm obviously not getting anywhere, and driver hacking still is
a closed book to me. However, I'm quite interested in learning more, or
at least try and help someone who's further down this road by testing
patches etc. In case I'm alone with this, I'd highly appreciate some
pointers on how to get started. I don't remember, was Atheros a nice or
an evil company? How can I get the information I need to get this to work?
Thanks for your time,
Moritz
