Webpage update and 2.6.1 oops

[Pavel Roskin]

On Thu, 5 Feb 2004, Andrew Barr wrote:

[snip]
> Also, thanks to Pavel for the suggestions. I have changed the page
> accordingly.

Very nice.  I'm glad to see that you removed all that unneeded complexity.

Please remove "rant" at the end.  linux-wlan-ng 0.2.1-pre17 supports
flashless cards, although it has a serious bug in the prism2dl utility.
A workaround is to run firmware files through "sort".  I hope the next
version will be released shortly.

It would be much more useful to write something informative about the
status of the linux-wlan-ng driver.  HostAP support is still better
because it determines the memory type and whether the card is PCI, while
with linux-wlan-ng you have to write is manually to the initial PDA.

> Finally, and most importantly, I am trying kernel 2.6.1 on my computer. My
> card works okay, but the problem I am having comes when I down wlan0 and
> remove the drivers. If I remove the cryptography module first
> (hostap_crypt_wep) and then remove hostap_pci and hostap, there's trouble.
> 'rmmod hostap_pci' segfaults (with a kernel oops in the logs) and 'rmmod
> hostap' locks up the terminal. The output is below. You will see that rmmod
> with a PID of 1335 caused the oops. The rmmod that freezes the terminal has
> a PID of 1336, so I am pretty sure that remove hostap_pci is causing the
> oops.

I can reproduce a similar but possibly related problem.  If a WEP key is
set and I remove hostap_crypt_wep, iwconfig causes an oops in
prism2_ioctl_giwencode().

> Now for the interesting part. If I remove hostap_pci _first_, and then
> remove hostap_crypt_wep, and hostap, there's no trouble at all. Is this
> supposed to be this way or is there a bug here? Could I be doing
> something wrong?

Kernel should not crash if you are doing something wrong (short of
unscrewing and removing PCI cards from a working machine).  Reference
counting should prevent unloading of the modules that are currently in
use.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin