Can't control what module is loaded for a Prism2 card

[Andrew Jorgensen]

There are at least three modules which handle the prism2 chipset on pcmcia: orinoco_cs, hostap_cs, and prism2_cs. I can't find any way to control which is used. The documentation for pcmciautils says it's handled by hotplug, which isn't used on dapper, or udev. Reality suggests that it's probably still controlled by the config files installed by pcmcia-cs.

I have tried replacing every mention of orinoco_cs in /etc/pcmcia with hostap_cs and what I get is that both orinoco_cs and hostap_cs are loaded but orinoco_cs gets the device.

The hostap driver is supported by wpasupplicant. The orinoco driver is not.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

On Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 06:15:52PM -0000, Andrew Jorgensen wrote:
> There are at least three modules which handle the prism2 chipset on
> pcmcia: orinoco_cs, hostap_cs, and prism2_cs. I can't find any way to
> control which is used.

Add the ones you don't want to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.

> The documentation for pcmciautils says it's handled by hotplug, which
> isn't used on dapper, or udev. Reality suggests that it's probably
> still controlled by the config files installed by pcmcia-cs.

I think that version of reality is unlikely. :-) Nowadays the kernel is
responsible for mapping PCMCIA devices to drivers, and gets udev to load
the appropriate kernel modules. pcmcia-cs is only still there for a few
corner cases that don't apply to you, and cardmgr is no longer actually
run with the current kernel.

> The hostap driver is supported by wpasupplicant. The orinoco driver is
> not.

Yeah, sadly there is no sane default that works well for everyone here.
If whatever the kernel picks doesn't work well for you then you need to
tell it otherwise using /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.

--
Colin Watson [<email address hidden>]

[Andrew Jorgensen (ajorg)]

> Add the ones you don't want to
> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.

Will try that. Thanks for the suggestion.

> I think that version of reality is unlikely. :-)

I wouldn't have thought so either, but a couple of things lead me to believe this:

1. Both hostap_cs and orinoco_cs get loaded. That's just wierd, that's all.

2. If I uninstall pcmcia-cs (and hence it's config files) nothing gets loaded in the way of drivers for this card at all. This behavior is true after a clean reboot as well. Without the pcmcia-cs package nothing works at all in pcmcia.

There may very well be other reasons for this behavior.

[Ewan Mac Mahon (ewan-macmahon)]

The old way of selecting was by installing the hostap-utils package which includes /etc/hotplug/blacklist.d/hostap-utils which blacklists the orinoco modules.

This behaviour can be restored by adding an equivalent /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-hostap file to the hostap-utils package to prevent the new tools from loading the orinoco modules.

[Andrew Jorgensen (ajorg)]

I would be happy with the fix Ewan proposes. I do still think it's strange / wasteful that both drivers get loaded though. Is that another bug or is that how Linux is supposed to work?

[sam tygier (samtygier)]

sounds more like a support request/question than a bug. and the original problem seems to have been resolved.

[Ewan Mac Mahon (ewan-macmahon)]

Nope, it's a bug, but it's already been refiled against hostap-utils (where the problem really lies) as bug #41652