Comment 0 for bug 408165

I have a "Linksys By Cisco" brand WUSB600N v2. Its USB ID is
1737:0079 Rev. 0101

When the USB adapter is hotplugged (or even coldplugged) the USB bus recognizes that "something" has been plugged in, but no additional modules are loaded at all. The output of `lsmod' before and after hot insertion is identical. So no modules claim they support this card.

The original of this model, WUSB600N, is supposedly an rt2870-compatible chip. I am not sure whether "v2" is an entirely different chipset, or whether it's just rt2870 with a quirk. I tried manually adding the USB ID to the rt2870sta source code and rebuilding the driver, but doing so gave me a kernel oops within that module. So apparently the fix to get it supported isn't as simple as adding that one line. But at least rt2870 seems to be partially aware of the chip -- right after the oops I ran `ifconfig' and the interface was up and I could get its MAC address (and it was correct). But since the module oopsed, I was unable to send any commands to the wireless interface via NetworkManager, iwconfig, etc.

I'm not sure how fervently upstream tries to support manufacturers who buy the rt2870 chipset and put it in their own product. If Ralink is nice enough to patch their drivers for the quirks of other vendors' products (such as Linksys) then it's just a matter of waiting. But if the action is in Linksys' court, I'm not sure they would help us at all. I think we will need a volunteer kernel hacker to take a look at it and see if the fix is reasonably easy.

Since these wireless USB adapters are relatively inexpensive, I am willing to donate one to a single competent individual who believes he/she can get this working well. All I ask in return is that you get it working, and return it to me when you are done with it (shipping at my expense)... unless of course you break it, which is understandable. Fragile little device.

NB: I've tested this thoroughly on both Jaunty and Karmic. The only noticeable difference is that the rt2870sta driver seems to be better integrated into the mainline kernel in Karmic, but the new set of rt2* drivers still fail to automatically probe this card. I applied my patch to the rt2870sta driver downloaded from Ralink's website and built that on Jaunty, but did not test my naive patch against the Karmic kernel sources, as I expected the same result.