On Saturday 03 February 2007 02:05, John Nielsen wrote:> This is a bit of a followup to my post of over a year ago:
>
> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2005-November/020289.ht
>ml
>
> I've been playing with FreeBSD on the TC1000 Tablet PC again lately and
> brought it up to 6-STABLE. Compaq still has the same (Windows) drivers
> for the built-in wlan device as they did the last time, and it still
> doesn't work with ndis (ndisgen succeeds but the module causes a panic
> when it is loaded).
>
> However today I was able to locate an alternate driver for the card on
> one of the "secondhand" Windows driver websites. It's an NDIS
5.1 driver
> that works with my hardware under Windows XP, but it doesn't seem
> terribly modern (it comes with its own utility for setting the wireless
> settings).
>
> Under FreeBSD, ndisgen produced a module without any problem, and this
> one _doesn't_ case a panic when loaded. And it only sometimes causes a
> panic when trying to configure the interface (possibly just a race
> condition at boot).
>
> I'm now able to configure the interface and see it associate on both
> ends. When I attempt to get a DHCP lease, the DHCP server sees the
> request and sends an offer but the tablet never receives it for some
> reason. So it seems I can send (on Layer 2 at least) but not receive.
> Layer 3 doesn't work in either direction, presumably because the tablet
> never gets any ARP replies.
>
> I'm wondering if anyone has any experience with similar situations
and/or
> ideas for workarounds or troubleshooting strategies (or even vague
> theories). The files I'm using are netvnpci.inf and
> pcifvnet.sys--a "FastVNET PCI 11M Network Adapter driver" from
ATMEL.
In case anyone's interested (Milan O, are you out there?), I got this
working (for basic values of "working"). I didn't actually get
anywhere
with the NDIS 5.1 (WinXP) driver, but I can send _and_ receive using the
NDIS 5.0 (Win2k) driver. The driver is a pseudo-ethernet driver (from the
days before Windows had 802.11 support) so it has some warts, but working
is better than not, IMO.
I actually had the same problem with this one as I did with the other one
(could send but not receive) until I disabled usbd. No idea why that
matters, but running usbd definitely makes the driver stop receiving
packets. This might be related to the issues I was having with the XP
driver, but the same workaround (disabling usbd) didn't have any effect
with that one.
For anyone who might want to do the same thing, here's what I did:
Download Atmeldrivers.zip (9.7M) from DriverGuide.com (registration
required).
Extract and go to the "USB Adapter/Driver and
Utility/Drivers/PCI/win982k"
directory.
Run ndisgen using NETVNpci.INF and pcifvnet.sys.
Copy the resultant pcifvnet_sys.ko into /boot/modules.
Add 'pcifvnet_sys_load="YES"' to /boot/loader.conf.
Add 'ifconfig_ndis0="DHCP"' to /etc/rc.conf.
Create an /etc/rc.early file with contents similar to this:
#!/bin/sh
sysctl dev.ndis.0.ESSID="myssid"
ifconfig ndis0 up
sleep 5
Apply the attached patch to src/sys/dev/if_ndis/if_ndis.c, then rebuild and
reinstall the ndis and if_ndis modules. This might be optional (not 100%
sure), but without it you'll get lots of complaints about unknown ethernet
speeds. The patch just tells the driver to treat all the wireless speeds as
10baseT.
Reboot.
I'm not sure if setting the ESSID is necessary or even useful, since the
card will associate fine without it. I also don't know if or how well WEP
works using the registry-key sysctls.
I'm still open to thoughts on why the WinXP driver wouldn't work or why
this
one only works without usbd, but I'm probably done messing with it for a
little while at least.
JN
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