Re: iwn and Intel PRO/Wireless 5100AGN

[Stephen Borrill <netbsd%precedence.co.uk@localhost>]

On Sun, 16 Nov 2008, Pouya D. Tafti wrote:
> I have been trying to hack iwn (in a hopelessly convoluted way) in
> order to add support for the Intel PRO/Wireless 5100AGN adapter.  This
> is on a Lenovo Thinkpad T400 running NetBSD/amd64 5.99.02.
>
> What I have been trying to do is to load a different firmware
> (iwlwifi-5000-ucode-5.4.A.11.ucode, which I placed manually under
> /usr/pkg/libdata/if_iwn/) [1], but iwn complains saying that the
> firmware header is invalid.  From dmesg:
>
> iwn0: invalid firmware header
> iwn0: could not load firmware
> iwn0: could not lock memory
> iwn0: could not lock memory
> ...
>
> Linux has a driver [1].

As does OpenBSD. Take a look at the diff which adds support and you'll see
it's not at all trivial (and that's just the start, there's been a slew of 
extra commits after the basic support was added):

http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/sys/dev/pci/if_iwn.c.diff?r1=1.23;r2=1.24

From the commit message: "Quite frankly, Intel made things unnecessarily 
difficult by gratuitously changing firmware commands (adding new fields in 
the middle of a struct) and some register offsets for the 5000 Series and 
by defining yet another way of loading a firmware."

So unfortunately, the job is a lot bigger than you've anticipated, but on 
the upside, Damien's work on the OpenBSD driver is a good place to start.

--
Stephen