From owner-freebsd-hardware  Mon Sep 25 12:20:11 2000
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	id 3F3E037B43C; Mon, 25 Sep 2000 12:20:01 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Re: Help with WaveLAN Card
In-Reply-To: <20000925111607.Q10523@schooner.svjava.com> from Eric Kozowski at "Sep 25, 2000 11:16:07 am"
To: eric@svjava.com (Eric Kozowski)
Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2000 12:20:01 -0700 (PDT)
Cc: antonio@icon.net.mx, mobile@FreeBSD.ORG, hardware@FreeBSD.ORG
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From: wpaul@FreeBSD.ORG (Bill Paul)
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> On Mon, Sep 25, 2000 at 11:11:51AM -0700, Antonio Varela Lizardi wrote:
> > 
> > Apollogies in advance for the crossposting, but my deadline related to this
> > matter it's very close.
> > 
> >   I have a Lucent WaveLAN Silver 11Mbps PCMCIA Card, a Texas Instrument
> > (chipset recognized as 1225) PCMCIA-PCI Cardbus bridge (sold by lucent), a
> > regular Desktop PC and FreeBSD 4.1-STABLE. I just cannot get the card to
> > work. It's recognized sucessfully by pccardd, but I'm having an error: "tx
> > buffer allocation failed" with any network operation over the card. Diggin
> > out more, I've found that wi_seek( ) it's failing with a WI_TIMEOUT, when
> > wi_alloc_nicmem( ) calls to alloc the tx buffer, when wi_init ( ) tries to
> > initialize the card. The allocation of the management buffer suceeeds, and
> > that sounds strange. The wi driver talks straight to the Hermes Controller,
> > not using the card's firmware. I wonder if in this new product, the hardware
> > has changed. In the wi manpage it's written about supporting 6Mbps cards,
> > but never mentions 11Mbps cards. In the PAO FAQ found something about
> > configuring the card with the MSDOS utility, but I just can't find it,
> > neither CDROM/Website. Folks, you're my only hope, otherwise I'll have to
> > install Linux. Any hint or bad news (the 11mbps card is supported?) will be
> > welcome. Please help.

Actually, the wi driver does not talk directly to the controller: it
talks to the firmware. But it talks to the firmware directly rather than
using the HCF (hardware control functions) library that Lucent normally
uses. The libhcf library hides most of the hardware details from you.
I chose not to use it because a) the original version of it that I got
from Lucent was contaminated by the GPL, and b) the code is pretty
yucky in my opinion.

That said, the firmware interface is virtually identical for all of
the cards, which includes the 2mbps, 6mbps and 11mbps ones. We're
using the 11mbps gold cards in the office. The Orinoco cards should
just be the same WaveLAN cards with a different name on them.

> as per the many discussions, as are available in the archives, the pci
> based bridge from lucent does not currently work.

That may be, but he's not what he said. Read closer: he has a laptop
with a particular cardbus bridge chipset, *not* a PCI card. I've heard
of this problem before, but I don't know if it's directly related to
the wi driver itself. The WaveLAN cards I have work with the laptops
that I've tried here, as well as with the ISA-PCMCIA bridge adapter
cards that came with the Webgear cards.

If I can get my hands on a laptop with that particular chipset, I'll
see if I can debug the problem. The 11mbps cards are supposed to work
though.

-Bill


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