Rethinking the Ralink wireless driver situation

[Dave Jones]

On Wed, Jun 20, 2007 at 11:04:42AM +0100, Jonathan Underwood wrote:
 > Hi,
 > 
 > In F-7 a decision was made to bundle in the rt2x00 wireless drivers
 > for Ralink cards. I contend this was a poor decision because, simply
 > put, they do not work. Not for any ralink chipset device I have tried
 > (and I've tried several). Upstream rt2x00 developers have also gone on
 > a 3 month development hiatus. See: http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/
 > 
 > But, upstream also maintains what they refer to as enhanced legacy
 > drivers - basically the open source drivers provided by Ralink but
 > polished to be more consistent with general use (eg. ripping out the
 > odd /etc/Wireless configuration tree, and placing firmware in
 > /lib/firmware). This work *really* well on all devices I have tried
 > for which rtx00 does not work. It's a hassle for an end user to
 > install them though, as it involves blacklisting the broken rtx00
 > modules. Not a big deal, but it wrecks the "out of the box"
 > experience.
 > 
 > So, please please consider bundling the rt2400, rt2500, rt2470, rt61
 > and rt73 drivers for F-8 and ditching rt2x00 until they make it into
 > the upstream kernel.

Fixing the broken drivers sounds like a better answer rather than
shipping something that will never get upstream.   Yes, wireless
sucks right now, but running away from the problem isn't going to
make it any better.

	Dave

-- 
http://www.codemonkey.org.uk