Bug 149141

Created attachment 67056 [details]
NetworkManager messages

Stefan, this is with the packard bell

Well, the problem is that the Ralink drivers do not work with wpa_supplicant. In theory, all drivers can be used with wpa_supplicant, at least in non-WPA modes. I'll have a look, maybe the driver can be fixed.

It doesn't look good. By modifying the driver and wpa_supplicant I've managed to get a connection with NetworkManager, but it's quite sloppy (losing about 10% packets on pinging), and I even encountered a machine lockup. Even without NetworkManager and wpa_supplicant I hardly get an association. I fear the driver is quite broken actually.

I do not have any experience with the card, but I have heard nothing good about the driver, either.

I had another look at the driver and I think it does not make sense to ship it. I've even tried the latest CVS snapshot, which looks more promising, but I still did not manage to get a connection with it. I think it's the best to disable the driver and offer it later as an online update when things stabilised. Any other opinions?

If it does not work, then it does not work, and I agree we should not ship it, particularly since it is out-of-tree.  I trust your opinion on the matter.

Also, it is not a particularly popular driver (such as madwifi).

I would prefer that it work and we ship it, but if we don't have the time and ability to fix it, then let's not ship it and instead concentrate on the subset of drivers that do work.

Let's open a new bug for the release notes of SUSE Linux 10.1.

I agree to not ship it if it does not work.

Another possibility would be to go back to the old Ralink drivers we had in 10.0. They don't work very well, but at least they work.

Let's get this one to work. It's one of the very few free WLAN driver that exist. It would be a shame not to have it. It worked very well on SLES10. If the latest version doesn't cut it, let's go back to the old rt2500 modules. 

This is hardware that's shipping woth more and more laptops these days and worth investing some time.

Shipping the old modules is not a very good idea. This way we would need to maintain for 7 years code that is unmaintained upstream. Furthermore it seems the old modules do also not work properly on kernel 2.6.16. Stefan Scheler did some tests, IIRC he reported 30% packet loss. I already removed the driver from wlan-kmp, btw.

Two comments:
1. As far as I know, the driver does not need wpa-supplicant,
   because the driver is able to use WPA on it's own (that's how
   I use it).
2, It's not an option to simply remove a driver, if it does not work;
   I'm really happy with it on CODE 9.
I'll try soon with NLD 10 and my sitecom-pcmcia-card, what I can achieve
(yes, I have a CVS-checkout here).

It is not that the driver needs wpa_supplicant, it is that NetworkManager needs wpa_supplicant.  Although I am unsure how a driver can do WPA on its own, without a supplicant.

Anyhow, I agree with jg's original decision, but what he does is obviously up to him.

> Although I am unsure how a driver can do WPA on its own, without a supplicant.

It does, that's the reason, why I use this card: as far as I see, WPA is partly
implemented in the driver itself, partly supported directly by the card.
The older releases also had a nice gui for configuration of WEP, WPA and all
that stuff.

And that's the reason the card isn't going to work with wpa_supplicant or NetworkManager, then, I fear.

Comment 14:
> 1. As far as I know, the driver does not need wpa-supplicant,
>    because the driver is able to use WPA on it's own (that's how
>    I use it).
The old driver had its own way to do WPA, right. Which was quite annoying, as it was not possible to integrate it in our network system. The new drivers will most probably support wpa_supplicant.
> 2, It's not an option to simply remove a driver, if it does not work;
     I'm really happy with it on CODE 9.
At the risk of repeating myself, even the old driver as included in CODE9 does not work properly anymore. See comment 13.

We will support Ralink devices again as soon as the new driver works properly with 2.6.16.

Originally this bug was called "rt2500 does not work with NM", then "... with wpa_supplicant". But note that now it does not work at all.
I really wonder what the upstream developers/users do.

They probably did not move to 2.6.16 yet.

Can we open this one to the public? See http://lists.opensuse.org/archive/opensuse/2006-Apr/0065.html

Thanks.

It works very well on SL 10.0, I have it both as PCMCIA and PCI on 2 boxes, running flawlessly since months. No packet loss, no issues whatsoever.

It's one of the very rare GPL'd wifi NIC drivers out there, it's a shame to drop it.

Got any report or details about what is not working with that driver on 2.6.16 ?
Had someone who told me it works on gentoo with 2.6.16-ck1.
Has the issue been sent upstream at all ?

Thanks for any details.

I have been using rt2500-kmp-$flavor from Packman with 10.1
http://packman.links2linux.com/?action=831

so it works, fixed

Reopened. PAckman is nice, but there's more to consider.
Joe, please take a look.

The package on packman includes the old driver. I've encountered lots of package loss under the 10.1 kernel with it, so we did not ship it. It's also completely unmaintained by the developers, so we probably do not want to ship it anyway. The current development version of the Ralink drivers is still not mature enough yet to include it, it needs to be re-evaluated in time.

Joe, we should re-evaluate this for 10.2!

It works fine for me on SLED10. However I'm using hand-made scritps to bypass networkmanager etc...

We are looking at the Ralink-driver for Sl10.2 and SP1. 

But it looks like no big development is done for that driver, and without reliable working WPA-support and good quality of packet reception it's currently hard to say if we will really put it in one of those two.

Bypassing the valid GUIs with some hand-made scripts is not an option :)

FYI: STABLE/Factory now has the rt2x00 driver. If somebody is willing to test it, I'd be interested in feedback.

Where can we get the rt2x00 driver from STABLE/Factory for testing?

http://ftp.opensuse.org/pub/opensuse/distribution/SL-OSS-factory/inst-source/suse/
It's part of wlan-kmp-default.

I'm leaving Novell. If TPM assistance is needed, please ask Joachim Plack (AMD related issues) or Oliver Ries (general x86_64/i386) for assitance.

We will try to get a working ralink-driver in 10.3 with devicescape support. For 10.1 this is a CANTFIX. Seife, you can test the PAckage mentioned by Joe in comment 33 if you still have problems on 10.2, and in that case create a new bug.