WLAN w/ RealTek chips?

[Gerhard Sittig]

Browsing through the newly released German c't magazine I noticed
a rather cheap offer for PCMCIA WLAN cards (EUR 25,-).  The "spec"
in the commercial and on the website reads like a generic WiFi
product (802.11b, 2.4GHz, 128bit WEP, 1/2/5.5/11 MBit).  But the
"RealTek chipset" mentioned makes me stop and wonder.

What are the chances of FreeBSD support for these cards?

`grep -r -i realtek src/share/man/man4` in a -CURRENT sandbox
(cvs up'ed last Thursday) only pointed to the ethernet drivers
(RealTek 8029 in ed.4, RTL 8002 in rdp.4, and RealTek 8129/8139
and MPX5030 clones in rl.4).  `grep -r -i realtek src/sys/dev`
only hits on ed/if_ed_pci.c (RTL8029), mii/miidevs (PHYs),
mii/rlphy.c (the RealTek PHY), sound/pcm/ac97.c (huh, RealTek
produces AC'97 codecs?), and usb/if_axe.c (USB ethernet).

Reading the wlan driver manpages does not hint me any further.
FYI, here are the revisions of the manpages I read:
$FreeBSD: src/share/man/man4/an.4,v 1.17 2003/02/24 02:20:20 trhodes Exp $
$FreeBSD: src/share/man/man4/awi.4,v 1.12 2003/02/15 17:12:53 trhodes Exp $
$FreeBSD: src/share/man/man4/wi.4,v 1.42 2003/04/10 17:04:03 shiba Exp $
$FreeBSD: src/share/man/man4/man4.i386/ray.4,v 1.9 2002/01/21 12:36:12 mpp Exp $


For those interested:  visit http://www.innet24.de/ and follow
the Netzwerk -> Wireless -> "ALL0182 Wireless PCMCIA Adapter"
route.  Yes, ALLNET is a local OEM vendor, so the label doesn't
mean too much.  But I'm quite satisfied with what I've seen from
them so far (NICs and switches).  And I still some kind of hope
that the "RealTek" is just a typo -- but the price is not the
same as for Prism2/2.5/3 cards so  this could/must really be some
newer/cheaper/different chipset.  Hmmm ...


BTW do I not know how to read the pile of words at the "ALL0272
Wireless 54 Mbit PCMCIA Adapter" description (54MBit/s with
Intersil chips?).  And the "ALL0192 Wireless PCMCIA Adapter
V.3.0" seems to be the Prism3 card.  http://www.allnet.de/ isn't
too informative either.


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Gerhard Sittig   true | mail -s "get gpg key" Gerhard.Sittig at gmx.net
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