Need advice: whether to flash DLink DWL-520

[Jouni Malinen]

On Mon, Aug 11, 2003 at 11:15:12AM -0400, James B. Hiller wrote:

> The DWL-520 in Machine A performing the host function has:
> 
> NIC ID=x8013 v1.0.0
> PRI ID=x15 v1.0.5
> STA ID=x1f v1.3.4

> a.  Is there a good reason to upgrade the firmware on this card
> serving as the host AP/router?  If so, to which versions, using
> which tool, available where (firmware and tool)?  Should I do only
> the volatile, and if so, would I need to do the non-volatile to get
> to a version which supports non-volatile?

Yes, you should consider upgrading the firmware. That combination of
PRI/STA firmware is known to have a bug that causes corruption of data
on PCI bus. This was fixed in PRI 1.0.7 / STA 1.3.5, so it or anything
newer is probably better solution.

I would recommend first testing with volatile upgrade to make sure that
the new firmware version actually works with your card and there are no
unpleasant surprises waiting to happen. At least some people have
reported dropped signal strength/quality with new firmware versions. It
is possible that the PDA on the card does not include all new
configuration values and the defaults in the firmware image are not
optimal for that card, etc.

If you are going to download firmware images with Host AP driver, please
use the latest CVS snapshot of it.


> c.  Should I be compiling the Prism 2.5 kernel driver into the kernel
> on the host ap machine as I've been doing, should I not be, or does
> it not matter?

What do you mean with "Prism 2.5 kernel driver"? orinoco_pci?
hostap_pci? If you plan to use two different drivers for the same PCI
card, I would not link them into the kernel image.. If it is only one
driver, then it should be OK to link it in.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA