iwi(4) and its non-free firmware

[Taylor R Campbell <campbell%mumble.net@localhost>]

Hello!  Today I installed NetBSD-current (as of 2008-06-24) on an i386
laptop with an Intel wifi card for which I must use iwi(4).  I managed
the network install through the apparently somewhat broken fwip(4),
since the non-free firmware was not available before NetBSD and pkgsrc
were installed.  (Miraculously, fwip(4) made it all the way through
the install, though I had to help it out by setting up a local mirror,
rather than routing packets through another laptop, and once NetBSD
was installed it finally panicked.)

Now I have NetBSD and the package sysutils/iwi-firmware3 installed.
Initially any attempt to use the iwi0 interface would report the same
firmware errors, which went away when I copied /usr/pkg/libdata/if_iwi
to /libdata/firmware/if_iwi, even though both /usr/pkg/libdata and
/libdata/firmware are in the sysctl variable `hw.firmware.path'.  The
wifi card still appears to do nothing, though: `dhcpcd iwi0' reports
`send_raw_packet: Network is down', and `wiconfig iwi0 -D' reports a
single bogus, anonymous entry, rather than the dozen or so that are
available here.  Is there a known solution or workaround for this?  If
not, what could I do to diagnose this further?