Still some problems with the rt2x00 driver

From: Rogério Brito
Date: Mon Nov 24 2008 - 22:27:50 EST


Hi again, Ivo, John and others.

On Aug 04 2008, Ivo van Doorn wrote:
I have found the problem and have send it upstream so the patch should be
present in 2.6.27.

Well, it works ok (but see below) on powerpc, with a 2.6.27 kernel (I still have not upgraded it).

There are two strange things that I've noticed, though and that I feel need to be fixed:

1 - the rt63 driver used by a PCMCIA card DWL-G630 model has, for many kernels (from 2.6.24 and up to and including kernel 2.6.27, as shipped by Ubuntu for ia32), shown a strange behavior: after everything is working correctly, the network simply becomes unavailable, with the gnome network monitor showing that the card has no signal. If I issue the command "iwconfig ra0 ap any", for example, the card starts working again.

(Actually, I put this on a cron job to be executed every minute, but even then, there are time windows where the card is not working). I'm not in front of the notebook (a very old Armada V300 that my parents are using for production), so I don't know if the card looses association with the Access Point or not. I can check that, if nobody else reported this problem yet.

2 - the rt2500usb driver that I use on a very old iBook G3 (powerpc) also works fine and has a similar, but not identical behaviour: the DWL-G122 USB stick that I have works fine once associated and when it is transferring data. Once I leave the network unused for, say, 2 minutes, the connection with the AP is dropped. Here, also, issuing "iwconfig wlan0 ap any" makes it work again.

Notice the difference in both cases: with the PCMCIA/ia32 case, no matter if there is traffic on the network or not, the the connection is interrupted. With the USB/powerpc case, if there is traffic, the connection remains working fine.

Note that I am not going to push it to 2.6.26 since I don't know if the
patch will cause problems in other parts of the driver.

There's no problem. I can compile vanilla kernels from kernel.org without any problems.


Thanks for your kind help, Rogério Brito.

--
Rogério Brito : rbrito@{mackenzie,ime.usp}.br : GPG key 1024D/7C2CAEB8
http://www.ime.usp.br/~rbrito : http://meusite.mackenzie.com.br/rbrito
Projects: algorithms.berlios.de : lame.sf.net : vrms.alioth.debian.org--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/