Re: rt73 driver trouble

[Lamarque Vieira Souza <lamarque syst com br>]

Em Ter 03 Abr 2007, Jouni Malinen escreveu:
> On Tue, Apr 03, 2007 at 09:35:50PM -0400, Dan Williams wrote:
> > On Tue, 2007-04-03 at 15:52 -0300, Lamarque Vieira Souza wrote:
> > > 	I managed to make NetworkManager to work with rt73 driver. The two
> > > patches I used are attached. The wpa_supplicant-0.4.8-ralink.diff
> > > patch is just a patch form of the files supplied by Ralink in
> > > directory RT73_Linux_STA_Drv1.0.3.6/WPA_Supplicant.
> >
> > Custom wpa_supplicant drivers are not the answer.  The answer is to fix
> > the driver to work correctly with the WEXT driver.  That's why
> > NetworkManager _only_ uses the WEXT driver with wpa_supplicant, because
> > there needs to be standardization on _one_ interface so that we don't
> > need to re-write stuff 50 times for each driver.

	I have my means to contact with Ralink's engineers, I can try to convince 
them to use WEXT instead. I do not garantee anything tough.

> While I agree with the part that drivers should really use WEXT, my
> policy on driver specific interface implementations for wpa_supplicant
> is quite a bit more open than the one for NM. However..
>
> > > 	Do you think the wpa_supplicant-0.4.8-ralink.diff can be applied to
> > > main wpa_supplicant? There is not indication of which license the
> > > code in RT73_Linux_STA_Drv1.0.3.6/WPA_Supplicant uses, the code in
> > > RT73_Linux_STA_Drv1.0.3.6/Module is GPL.
>
> This is an issue. I will not apply any random patch from a vendor that
> someone else sends to me, especially so, if there is no clear license
> statement or the change is licensed only under GPL. In other words, if
> someone really wants to get this patch into wpa_supplicant, that someone
> will need to talk with the copyright holder and confirm that this patch
> is available under a compatible (both GPLv2 and BSD) license. In many
> cases, it may be easier to just get the driver converted to support
> WE-18 for WPA configuration..

	Ok, I can convince them to release a new tar ball explicity stating the code 
is GPL, I think it will be easy to convice them since the module is already 
GPLv2. By the way, I used Suse 10.1 for my tests, the NetworkManager and 
NetworkManager-kde from Suse 10.2 do not need that hack for the fallback 
parameter, so the change for NetworkManager comes down to only use ralink 
driver with wpa_supplicant, which works for both WEP and WPA connections.

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-- 
Lamarque Vieira Souza
Senior Architect and Developer - Metasys
http://www.metasys.com.br
Tel.: +55 31 3296-9040 - Ramal 244
International Syst S/A