ral(4) on 8-RC1

[Sam Leffler]

Matt Dawson wrote:
> On Saturday 03 Oct 2009 19:28:50 you wrote:
>> ral probably does not populate it's initial channel list according to 
>> the device capabilities.  I'm guessing it falls back on the system code 
>> to do that and it fills in only channels 1-11.  This means future 
>> changes to regulatory cannot setup the channels you want--it's not 
>> allowed to add channels that are not listed in the "device
>>  capabilities".
> 
> That makes sense. Given that my 2561 card has "ETSI" stamped on its label, 
> one would think it's the card's job to report to the driver what it 
> supports. If the driver doesn't request this, the safest bet is the lowest 
> common denominator that should be legal everywhere, 11 channels at FCC 
> spec. Got it.
> 
> Just a quick question, if I may: Are the maxpower specs of regdomain.xml in 
> dBm?  ETSI is max 20dBm ERP at 2.4GHz. Euro spec cards are only capable of 
> ~100mW anyway, most more like 60mW and your average foot of RG-174 will 
> knock nearly a dB off at 2.4GHz, so it hardly matters, but I'm curious. The 
> manpage doesn't specify what the fields mean.

maxpower are expressed as dBm.

> 
>> You can hack ral to setup a proper channel list at attach or you can 
>> make a private hack to net80211 to populate the channel list w/ those 
>> channels you want.  Either is simple.
>  
> Thank you. I'll probably try the local hack for now, but hacking ral (and 
> probably iwi now I finally have that working, which does exactly the same 
> thing) to do the right thing would be a better long-term solution.
> 
> To the list: Does anyone have any idea why the iwi firmware modules build 
> by default on i386 and not on amd64? I know from experience that manually 
> building them on 7.1 amd64 didn't work, but it now works well on 8 except 
> for the messages about mcast/promisc update separation.

I had problems w/ the iwi firmware on 64-bit so set the build to i386
only.  The problems I had were relocation errors and noone could help;
if those are gone then building the fw image for amd64 should be fine.
Whether the driver works is another matter...

	Sam