What do you think about compat-wireless, iwl3945, & how does kernel find "updates" modules?
John W. Linville
linville at redhat.com
Tue Mar 11 19:50:27 UTC 2008
On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 01:22:23PM -0500, Paul Johnson wrote:
> It mentions a project compat-wireless which has daily-updated code for
> many different network kernel modules. Here's the tarball
>
> http://linuxwireless.org/download/compat-wireless-2.6/compat-wireless-2.6.tar.bz2
>
> The patches mentioned on Bill Moss's page are already applied in the
> compat-wireless package that is online today. It is updated every
> day.
Not quite true. Bill's page has links to two patches. One of them
is in the tree, the other is not. I predict the other will be in
the tree within a few days.
> A case in point. I have the Intel ipw3945 wireless in a Dell Laptop.
> It hardly ever works under the iwl3945 driver in the 2.6.24 kernel
> from Fedora, but I have had some luck experimenting with various koji
> kernels. I never could figure out why it would change from day to
> day, but I'm getting an idea that it traces back to the
> compat-wireless changing from day to day.
Hmmm...well, my wireless-testing tree changes from day to day. That
tree feeds both the Fedora kernels and the compat-wireless package.
> If you are one of the suffering iwl3945 users with the 2.6.24 kernel,
> I wonder if the compat-wireless modules will help you as well? You
> might as well try it. It is as easy as a "make" and "make install"
> "make unload" and "make load". Or a restart. Their directions are
> great.
Even easier, go get the latest F8 (or rawhide) kernel out of Koji:
http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=8
You'll get the same set of wireless bits (give or take a day or two
from time to time) and you won't have to build anything yourself.
Plus you'll have a versioned package, so that later updates will
apply appropriately without requiring further builds.
> I'm a little puzzled why or how the kernel (or is it depmod?) knows to
> use the updates drivers before the ones provided by the kernel. See
> what I mean, I have both sets still:
I think it is just smart enough to look there first.
Hth!
John
--
John W. Linville
linville at redhat.com
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