Multiple PCI HostAP Cards

[Denis Vlasenko]

On Tuesday 06 April 2004 05:30, Pavel Roskin wrote:
> 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.

I use two cards (actually, four cards in two boxes). Works ok.
One box have third, non-Prism2 card, too.

BTW, cards seems to talk to each other via RF generated on mobo
circuitry ;) You need to set them at least 6 channels apart
to get rid of interference.
--
vda