Wireless on hp 6710b

[Sam Leffler]

Ian Smith wrote:
> On Wed, 9 Apr 2008, Benjamin Close wrote:
>  > besideinfo wrote:
>  > > --- Yousif Hassan <yousif at alumni.jmu.edu> wrote:
>  > >
>  > >   
>  > >> I don't really understand what you mean here.  Do
>  > >> you mean they do not show 
>  > >> up in kldstat at all, or that they do show up in
>  > >> kldstat but are still 
>  > >> "missing" in terms of being attached?  (Both
>  > >> scenarios possible).
>
> [..]
>
>  > > Sorry my previous post was incomplete.
>  > >
>  > > what I mean is that the five modules are declared in
>  > > the loader.conf, but kldstat doesn't show them up. 
>  > >
>  > > I tried to locate the five module using the locate
>  > > command, but the only modules presents on my notebook
>  > > are wlan_amrr.ko and wpifw.ko. 
>  > > The modules if_wpi, wlan_scan_sta and wlan_scan_ap do
>  > > not exists. 
>  > >
>  > > I forgot to say that this the first time I use freeBSD
>  > > a mailing list and above my english is bad. So any
>  > > advice are well accept.
>  > >
>  > >   
>  > Some modules will not load as they are built into the kernel by default.
>
> To besideinfo:
>
> In which case you should use kldstat -v to show all in-kernel modules.
> This can be a big list, so perhaps best search for 'missing' ones with:
>
>  kldstat -v | egrep 'wpi|wlan'
>
> If they're there then there's no need to load them in /boot/loader.conf
>
>   

Folks, you're really making this more difficult than it needs to be.  If 
you do man wpi you will see these modules are needed by the driver:

if_wpi
pci
wlan
wlan_amrr
firmware

(wpi is driver name specified in the config file; unfortunately the 
module name doesn't match).  It turns out the wpi driver has builtin 
module dependencies for these so if you do:

kldload if_wpi

then the dependent modules will be brought in automatically.  Now in 
addition the wlan code is broken up and (right now at least) requires 
that you manually load:

wlan_scan_sta

to get sta mode scanning support, and, depending on any security 
requirements:

wlan_tkip
wlan_ccmp
wlan_wep

Otherwise, as discussed in the wpi man page the firmware requires that 
you acknowlege use by setting the tunable with kenv or in your loader.conf.

The hidden wlan dependencies should hopefully get fixed in HEAD soon.  
If someone were to pitch in to fixup sysinstall the firmware stuff could 
be handled at install time.  That would mean you'd just need to do

kldload if_wpi

as was always intended.

    Sam