Problems with MA111 and hotplug

Hi,

I'm having problems getting my Netgear MA111 wireless USB adapter to
work reliably with the linux-wlan-ng drivers when using hotplug under
Fedora Core 4. Here's a little background to the problem then I'll
describe what I've tried.

Background

When I insert the MA111, the wlan.agent hotplug script runs and tries to
load the linux-wlan-ng drivers (prism2_usb and p80211 modules) for it.
Sometimes it works successfully, and this appears in /var/log/messages:

Aug 21 12:41:04 malvern wlan.agent[22055]: WLAN wlan0 brought up
successfully.
Aug 21 12:41:04 malvern wlan.agent[22055]: WLAN bringing up layer 3+
with /sbin/ifup
Aug 21 12:41:05 malvern kernel: linkstatus=CONNECTED

If this happens then the wireless network works fairly well. However,
more often than not the drivers fail to load - it does try, but drops
out with an error which is usually this:

Aug 21 12:42:09 malvern kernel: hfa384x_docmd: ctlx failure=REQ_FAILED
Aug 21 12:42:09 malvern wlan.agent[22302]: Failed to enable the device,
resultcode= implementation_failure .
Aug 21 12:42:09 malvern wlan.agent[22302]: WLAN Could not bring up wlan0
Aug 21 12:42:09 malvern kernel: hfa384x_drvr_start: cmd_initialize()
failed, result=-5
Aug 21 12:42:09 malvern kernel: prism2sta_ifstate: hfa384x_drvr_start()
failed,result=-5

It seems to be random as to whether it loads successfully or not.

My setup

-  MA111 802.11b wireless USB adapter
-  Fedora Core 4
-  2.6.11-1.1369_FC4 kernel
-  Configured kernel sources for the above kernel
-  linux-wlan-ng 0.2.1-pre26 (the latest release as of 21-08-05)


What I've tried

I've configured the linux-wlan-ng drivers using make config and chose
only the usb module, and also enabled debugging. I have also tried with
debugging disabled but it doesn't seem to affect the problem (which is
good I suppose).

I turned on maximum debugging in /etc/modprobe.conf:

options prism2_usb prism2_debug=5
options p80211 wlan_debug=5

Using /var/log/messages, I deduced that it's encountering problems
trying to download the firmware image onto the card. If it fails to load
the driver, and I run

/sbin/prism2dl -s wlan0

to get the current status of the card, it tells me

prism2dl: No such device
load_cardpda failed, exiting.

However, if I then manually activate firmware-loading mode and try the
prism2dl status again, it works:

[root@malvern ~]# wlanctl-ng wlan0 lnxreq_ifstate ifstate=fwload
message=lnxreq_ifstate
   ifstate=fwload
   resultcode=success
[root@malvern ~]# /sbin/prism2dl -s wlan0
Current PDA:
    offset   len   code   data
   ---------------------------------------------------
   00000000  009  0x0001  5349 334c 3137 3030 0055 0000 0000 0000
...

Given that the hotplug script is calling prism2_fwload in
/etc/wlan/shared.prism2, which does exactly the same thing, I'm not sure
why this is failing.

I have also tried forcing a prism reset when the card is inserted using
the following line in /etc/modprobe.conf, as I've read that this
sometimes may help:

options prism2_usb prism2_doreset=1

I tried fiddling with the prism2_fwload function in
/etc/wlan/shared.prism2 - in particular, I added sleep statements both
before and after the line

$WLANCTL $1 lnxreq_ifstate ifstate=fwload

and I also tried duplicating that line. Duplicating the line did seem to
increase the odds of it loading, but it still isn't 100% of the time.
Having run out of ideas, and not being able to find anything else on the
web, does anyone have any suggestions?

Has anyone else had this problem?

Regards
David Gee

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