[Prism54-devel] Netgear WG511 not functional

[Marcel Birthelmer]

Dear List,
I have just encountered a revision (?) of the Netgear 511 that no longer
works with the prism54 driver, both in the kernel and the one from the
site.
This card ships in the same orange box as the old, well-known wg511 pcmcia
card, but it has some aesthetic differences: the part that sticks out is
now white instead of the earlier gray, and it no longer has that "bubble"
thing over hte LEDs. In any case, we tested 3 of these cards and all
showed the following behaviour.
With the driver built into a 2.6.8.1 kernel: upon insertion of the card,
it would try to load the firmware, a soft reset would time out, and from
then on the card would spourt time outs and "full queues" (dmesg output
attached) and 'cardctl ident' would not show the card anymore (on a system
where the firmware was not present, 'cardctl ident' displayed the device
as an Intersil 3890, as expected). Removing the card from the slot makes
any subsequent access to the card bus hang indefinitely.
With the latest driver from the website, the firmware (isl3890) no longer
loads onto the card, while it is still identified in 'cardctl ident' as an
Intersil 3890.
Right now we suspect that the problem lies in the firmware, but I couldn't
manage to extract it from the windows CD (where it is lodged firmly in a
.sys file, as far as I can tell.)
I am of course willing to contribute whatever I can to get this problem
fixed as soon as possible, since we have already sent some units out to
customers, not realizing the change. It looks like Netgear pulled a switch
very recently, so once these hit stores (if they haven't already) i'm sure
others will find the same problem.
Any thoughts, ideas, requests for more info, etc.?
Thanks,

Marcel
LinuxCertified, Inc.