Intel Centrino Advanced-N + WiMAX 6150

[R3V0LV3R]

From everything I can find in bsd forums & google searches, this card is not supported in FreeBSD (and by extension PC-BSD).

I did find a snippet from a brief discussion from this past September, and reference to someone trying to get it working.

Does anyone know if ndisgen could get this working?


Damn, I'm soooo close! If I could just figure out how to get this card working and figure out touchpad synaptics scrolling (ongoing battle), I'd be set.

Another option I'd be willing to pursue is compiling a new kernel to support the wireless driver, if it would work.

[drulavigne]

It would be worthwhile asking Bernhard if he ever received a card. If not and the card is easily attainable, we can always send him one.

[R3V0LV3R]

Ok I'll give that a shot.

I did another little interesting test last night. On an old "on-it's-last-legs" laptop. I installed PC-BSD and tried ndisgen on a wireless USB, a Cisco Linksys AE2500. Even though ndisgen support for USB devices is supposedly pretty shoddy, I figured what the hell.... and it appeared that it worked.

So I made what I believe were the appropriate adjustments to /boot/loader.conf, reboot, and -

Somehow this small adjustment seemed to have completely shit-canned the system. I didn't bother to save the messages or anything but there were missing .db files, unusable font dirs, all kinds of stuff. None of it seemed related to adding an ndis module to loader.conf, but who knows.

I may try it on my functioning laptop tonight. But I use it for a lot of stuff so even with everything saved, nothing gets done while I'm trying to work out these kinks. But the old laptop seems to be a lost cause at this point.

[R3V0LV3R]

Okay....

Bad news: Bernhard hasn't been able to get access to a WiMax card.

Good news: He sent me a patch for iwn that works.


Bad news: Applying the patch clobbered the Intel GEM/KMS patch in PC-BSD 9.1. And I had no idea how to re-apply it.


So now, can anyone give me some direction on how I go about applying the iwn patch without wiping out the 9.1 Intel graphics patch?

[drulavigne]

Please post the details of the clobber to http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-x11 as it will catch the eyes of the devs who created the patch. Wouldn't hurt to cc Bernhard on the email in case he is not subscribed to the list.

[R3V0LV3R]

Well..... I hesitate to blame the devs for this yet.

My guess is that this was a procedural problem on my part. I'm currently posting this from my fall-back operating system, since the screen resolution rendered my laptop experience intolerable without the Intel patch. Which, by the way, works like a dream for the most part, other than forcing me to use XRender for desktop effects rather than OpenGL.

Since I've done a complete wipeout & reinstall on a different OS, I can't give any specific details right now. I may try again soon and if so, will make sure to document all the steps & clobber details.

At a high level, what I did was (1) apply the iwn patch and (2) rebuild the GENERIC kernel, which in retrospect was probably not the right thing to do since I was using the 9.1 kernel with the Intel GEM/KMS patch. The rebuild was successful in every way except for the lack of 9.1's Intel patch. Technically, there was probably no 'wipeout' of the patch. It may be more accurate to say I accidentally rebuilt a kernel that never had the Intel patch.

Is there a procedure for which kernel to rebuild (instead of generic) in this scenario?

[drulavigne]

You still rebuild GENERIC, but you'll need the patch. The original CFT with link to the patch is here: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/f...ry/011445.html.

[R3V0LV3R]

Thanks, Dru.

One other thing though - do you know how I fix the i915_suspend.c error when building the kernel?

I don't understand Konstantin's instructions for resolving it -

http://wiki.freebsd.org/Intel_GPU

I get a reject in i915_suspend.c.

The cause is that you use subversion-freebsd, which causes $FreeBSD$ tag expansion in the checkout. Manually edit the i195_suspend.c before applying the patch, to undo the expanded $FreeBSD$ tag into it short form.

Would I simply edit this block - (in /usr/src/sys/dev/drm/i915_suspend.c)

#include <sys/cdefs.h>
__FBSDID("$FreeBSD: src/sys/dev/drm/i915_suspend.c,v 1.4.4.1 2011/09/23 00:51:37 kensmith Exp $");

to -

#include <sys/cdefs.h>
__FBSDID("$FreeBSD$");

[kmoore134]

Yea, I had to do the same, modifying the patch to use the right FBSDID line.

[R3V0LV3R]

Kris, could you post your edited line(s) in that file?