[Prism54-users] Cardservices and Prism54

[Bradley Chapman]

Mr. Hegner,

--- "Stefan U. Hegner (Mobil)" <mobil@hegner-online.de> wrote:
> Hi Bradley,
> 
> somewhere in your email I picked up some notes of anger or frustration
> ... possibly because I'm still not getting this right.

I wasn't angry or frustrated, I was distracted -- I was doing something else
when typing that e-mail. I apologize if I upset you or offended you in any way.

> 
> Anyway, despite this your mail was very helpful and after another 3
> hours I got at least something that's working for me.
> 
> @mcgrof: I'm not shure about other newbies problems. - But some
> reference to what hotplug does (besides uploading firmware) and how an
> ifcfg-ethX file could look like that ifup can configure the interface
> might be a helpful addition to the README.
> 
> Am Die, 2003-12-02 um 17.59 schrieb Bradley Chapman: 
> > > After reading more docs I am pretty certain, that my problem is the
> > > integration of Prism54 into PCMCIA Cardservices.
> > 
> > Maybe not. Card Services handles PCMCIA cards. Hotplug handles Cardbus cards,
> > since Cardbus is a 32bit bus and is similar to PCI.
> 
> OK. But that suggests that I don't need pcmcia-cardservices at all.
> However in the README there is still a reference to pcmcia-cs (though
> related to Debian).

There may be -- but most of the documentation I read when futzing around with my
wireless device (a Linksys WPC11 ver.3) indicated that pcmcia-cs is for 16bit
PCMCIA cards and that hotplug handles the 32bit Cardbus cards. I could be wrong,
though -- try disabling pcmcia-cs altogether and see if things still work.

> 
> To spell this out it means 
> - the "old" ISL3890 uses pcmcia-cs and is configured by wireless.opts
> - the "new" prism54 uses hotplug and needs to be configured differently
> 
> > You don't. You need to play with the stuff in /etc/hotplug instead.
> 
> (This is how things work on my Mandrake 9.1)
> In the /etc/hotplug/net.agent ifplugd is called for bringing up
> interfaces on Mandrake systems. The latter in turn calls ifup.
> 
> I've now tried a series of things:
> 
> a.) modified /etc/hotplug/net.agent in order to call iwconfig before
> calling ifplugd. 
> 
>         case $INTERFACE in
>           eth1)
>             mesg calling iwconfig for $INTERFACE ...
>             /sbin/iwconfig $INTERFACE mode managed essid myessid
>           ;;
>         esac
> 
> This is not really elegant - but it works, since eth1 is on my machine
> my Primsm54 Adaptor.
> 
> The reason for this was my syslog showing me:
> 
> ifplugd(eth1)[3277]: Using interface eth1/00:00:00:00:00:00
> ifplugd(eth1)[3277]: Using detection mode: wireless extension
> ifplugd(eth1)[3277]: ifplugd 0.15 successfully initialized, link beat
> not detected.
> 
> In order to get a link beat detection, I needed to tell the card somehow
> mode and essid ... then I got a little further down the log:
> 
> ifplugd(eth1)[2285]: Link beat detected.
> ifplugd(eth1)[2285]: Executing '/etc/ifplugd/ifplugd.action eth1 up'.
> ifplugd(eth1)[2285]: Program executed successfully.
> 
> But this didn't bring me any further.
> 
> b.) created /etc/sysconfig/networking-scripts/ifcfg-eth1 (eth0 is a
> wired interface) with the following:
> 
> DEVICE=eth1
> BOOTPROTO=dhcp
> ONBOOT=yes
> WIRELESS_MODE=managed
> WIRELESS_ESSID=myessid
> 
> Now my card comes up on insertion and gets an address via dhcp. This
> works for me ... but I wonder, whether there is a better solution than
> my "rude" way to use iwconfig from hotplug.

I don't know either -- my Red Hat hotplug scripts make no reference to iwconfig,
which makes me think that hotplug handles the insertion and loading of the driver
while the Red Hat network subsystem takes care of configuring and activating the
card (using ifup and friends).

> 
> Finally, there are still this tons of "jiffi" messages in my syslog
> like:
> 
> kernel: islpci_mgt_response(): entry in queue not found yet, retrying
> (jiffies left = X
> kernel: islpci_mgt_response(): queue empty, retrying (jiffies left = X
> 
> Where the "jiffies left =" varies between 100 and 0. - Does this have to
> mean anything to me? I seem to get these messages only when the Prism54
> card is not yet set-up properly. - So I assume I can ignore this.

Check the forums -- mcgrof and others have said that this is a driver bug and
that they're trying to fix it.

> 
> However, I'm still curious to know what "jiffies" are ...

Jiffies are a strange name for an internal kernel variable which is used as a
timekeeping device for when parts of the kernel have to wait for something.
You can read kernel/timer.c in the source for more of an explanation as to what
they do.

> 
> Thanks again.
> 
> Stefan.

Brad



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