Kernel 2.6.25.4
May 17, 2008 —
BarryK
Right now I'm in the middle of recompiling the 2.6.25.4 kernel.
I made various configure changes relative to the 2.6.25 kernel compiled for Puppy 4.00:
1. Wifi, some more promiscuous modes turned on.
2. Hostap, checked that support for downloading firmware is on.
3. Interesting, the bcm43xx driver is now being offered as well as its replacements (b43 and b43-legacy) so I have enabled all. (Will have to sort out which one loads afterward)
4. The new pcmciautils system enabled.
5. Turned off "deprecated sysfs" -- the layout inside /sys keeps changing, but I figured might as well work with the new layout rather than hanging on with the old -- for example, I think /sys/block has moved.
6. Module for "software mac addon to 802.11 stack".
7. Enabled profiling support.
The source has ALSA 1.0.16rc2, so I downloaded 1.0.16-final however I found that it would not compile as I had configured 'soundcore' builtin to the kernel. So I had to recompile with 'soundcore.ko' as a module.
Comments
YayWiFi
Username: nic2109
"Barry; the test Dingo with the later kernel doesn't even turn my wireless card on. The previous one did and even (with help from Tempestuous - see http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=159339#159339 ) could get WPA going. The "offending" module is iwl3945 which does load, so something else must be missing.
softmac
Username: tempestuous
"Thanks for enabling the wifi "softmac" module. My post in the main forum on this subject was somewhat vague. Since then I have done some further investigation: the Linux wifi stack is now officially the "mac80211" development stream, but there are still a few wifi drivers which have not migrated over to this new subsystem. That's why the old "ieee80211" wifi stack continues in new kernels, and there are just 2 wifi drivers which require the "softmac" addon to the old wifi stack - bcm43xx and zd1211rw. As Barry mentioned, the bcm43xx should be considered redundant in favour of the newer b43 and b43legacy drivers, but in the case of the zd1211rw there is no other choice: so the ieee80211softmac module is essential in this instance. Regarding firmware, it seems that Barry has done a thorough job of updating firmware, but I can see just one driver with missing firmware in Puppy4 - Libertas. I have been trying to extract this firmware, but the necessary file - cf8385-5.0.16.p0-26306.tbz is currently unavailable on the web.
softmac
Username: tempestuous
"Oops, I was looking at 2.6.24 source code. It appears that the zd1211rw driver has moved over to the mac8011 wifi subsystem. Oh well, the ieee80211softmac module will be useful if we need to add any legacy wifi drivers in the future.
Linux kernel 2.6.25.5
Username: coolpup
"The latest stable version of the Linux kernel http://www.kernel.org/
Linux kernel 2.6.25.6
Username: coolpup
"The latest stable version http://www.kernel.org/
Tags: puppy