[Prism54-devel] Netgear WG511 not functional

[Luis R. Rodriguez]

Thanks for the report Marcel, this is probably anothe case of a hardware
vendor going with the SoftMAC chipsets and not changing the model number
of the cards. This is a horrible choise manufacturers have been doing
for a while now. For windows it doesn't matter since they still get a CD
with the SoftMAC driver -- we linux users are stuck with guessing and
finding things out the hardway. 

I'm wondering if there would be a way to force manufacturers to specify
the chipset on every card model they sell. This would be nice, probably
not possible.

Anyway, if your card is a SoftMAC card then it is not yet supported and
probably won't until Conexant starts working with us again. We have
e-mailed them and we haven't gotten a reply for over 3 months now.

	Luis

On Thu, Sep 16, 2004 at 08:03:12PM -0700, Marcel Birthelmer wrote:
> 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.
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