Multiple PCI HostAP Cards

[Pavel Roskin]

On Mon, 5 Apr 2004, Christopher Dobbs wrote:

> I used the source listing to develope an idea of the situation.  I will
> admit that I am not any good at writing PCI drivers, but it looks from
> the code that the driver software is only keeping track of the last card
> that it sees.

What happens is that hostap_pci probes 3 cards but only the last of them
can be initialized.  The first two fail.  The working card gets wlan0.
Later hostap_cs probes a PCMCIA card, which fails.  However, it's not
unregistered, so it keeps wlan1.

The PCI cards seem to be identical.  The only difference is the IRQ they
use.  It is possible that the cards don't work because of strong radio
interference which confuses the firmware.  Or they draw too much power
from the motherboard.  But I'm just guessing here.

By the way, you are using hostap version 0.0.1, which is very old.  Try at
least 0.1.3 or 0.2.0.

Firmware upgrade can also help with some inexplicable problems.  The
latest available secondary firmware for Prism 2.5 is 1.8.0, although some
users recommend 1.7.4 as the most stable firmware.  Primary firmware
should be updated too.  See HOWTO for Prism firmware:
http://linux.junsun.net/intersil-prism/

I have never used more than one PCI card, but the code seems to be safe.
I don't see any potential problem.  Beside, the first card would not have
problems with initialization if that was the reason.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin