Linux PCMCIA WaveLan Driver

I have taken over the maintainance of these drivers, formerly maintained by Jean Tourrilhes. He has a web page with lots of information about this driver.

As of pcmcia-cs-3.0.6, my latest patches to the driver have not been integrated. The current patch adds roaming support which can be enabled/disabled on the fly. Information on how to download/install the patch is here. The roaming support is based upon two patches.

• The first was written by Joe Finney from Lancaster University. He has a web page with information about his work on the driver.
• The second patch was written by Josephy O'Sullivan. This increases the performance while roaming. He also has a web page.

Here's a list of notes/erratas/todos compiled from various webpages

• Compiling a 2.1.X kernel with Wireless Extensions is tricky, because the CONFIG_NET_RADIO option has moved.
• Bob Gray found that if you place a PCMCIA card in an Access Point after having changed the setting with the driver, we really need to set correctly the PSA CRC. Patch is there, or here.
• Some Pcmcia cards behave very strangely: they claim to have sent the packet without CRC instead of with it. Previously Jean was treating that as an error, leading to a excessive number of reset of the card. Derrick J Brashear sent Jean this patch to treat it as a normal case, which dramatically decreases the number of reset in this case...
• John Ruttenberg claims that to compile iwconfig under a recent kernel, it can't find __u32. So, a quick (and ugly) fix is to go in iwconfig and:
  • add "#include ~/usr/src/linux/include/asm-i386/types.h"
• Some people have complained that it's currently impossible to find the version of net tools required to compile iwspy. Jean's managed to find one on his hard drive: net-tools-1.2.0. Jean doesn't guarantee that it will do anything usefull, especially under modern distributions (like the ones using glibc).
• The driver should do Domain ID checking.
• The driver should implement the official Roaming Protocol instead of the current method.
• The roaming code needs to be reimplemented on a lower level.

Other Useful Links

• Mobile IP and the Wavelan
• The Lucent WaveLan website
• Digital's RoamAbout Web Site
• David Hind's Linux PCMCIA Site
• Lancaster IPv6 Mobility Package
• WaveLAN/IEEE 802.11 Linux driver