rtl8187b: puzzled at reg_table

[Larry Finger]

Alexandre Oliva wrote:
> On Jan  2, 2009, Larry Finger <Larry.Finger at lwfinger.net> wrote:
> 
>> Alexandre Oliva wrote:
> 
>>> Any news on this front?
> 
>>> Thanks in advance.  Looking forward to a positive response from you all.
> 
>> I'm not sure what you want.
> 
> You mentioned you were getting in touch with Realtek to get their input
> on this device.  I was wondering how cooperative they were.
> 
> Other than that, I'm trying to decide whether those bits can be
> considered Free Software (i.e., none of the 4 essential freedoms can be
> substantially denied), before I include it in Linux-libre.

The Realtek engineers were quite helpful, even though the company has
not placed their driver on the web site. I don't know the reasons for
that decision.

>> We took the Realtek Linux driver and put the difference between that
>> driver and the RTL8187 device into the Linux driver.
> 
> Right.  That's why I'm following up with your upstream, to figure out
> how it got there, and whether we can get enough information to set it
> apart from 'black magic' and make it possible for a user to adapt it to
> suit her own needs.
> 
>> That code was incorporated into kernel 2.6.27. The are ongoing
>> improvements, but the driver works very well.
> 
> I've had trouble suspending one of my notebooks with an rtl8187b WiFi
> interface, but I haven't investigated whether that's a consequence of
> the removal of those bits.  I know some people are working with Lemote
> to try to address this same problem on their 100% Free laptops.  We'll
> see.

There is a Bugzilla on that problem with the Linux mainline driver and
I just discovered that if I rmmod/insmod the driver, then it generates
a mac80211 warning. OTOH, if I rmmod then unplug/replug, everything is
OK. As suspend/resume does a driver unload/reload, I suspect the two
problems are related.

Larry