I've been battling with this problem for a few days.

I have a Wireless PCMCIA Network Card that is supported via ATMEL's downloadable drivers. I downloaded and installed the driver, but I can't get the kernel to accept the modules. When I try to modprobe the appropriate module, the kernel reports that the module is invalid.

I recompiled the kernel after setting some options, and then compiled the drivers, so the same version of gcc should be used for both.

the cardsrv ident response is OK - It can see the card, etc. THe problem is that the kernel won't load the module as I compiled it.

If anyone else has ever tried to use the ATMEL drivers on 2.6 kernels, please help me to understand what I am doing wrong.

The Atmel card is still a pcmcia card, not a cardbus card, so modprobe won't work, cardctl still has to load the module for you, for that to work right though, you have to have an entry in /etc/pcmcia/config for the module that matches its manfid or ident line. You can get a patch file off of: atmelwlandriver.sourceforge.net by just downloading the whole source mess, finding their additional .conf file and pasting it onto the end of /etc/pcmcia/config, or you can hack it up by hand.

Its a matter of whatever distro you have has too old a version of pcmcia to have an entry for the atmel chipset cards.

Cheers,

Finegan

Resolution to this Problem: Atmel's drivers don't work under 2.6 . They are supposed to, but they don't. The solution was to patch my /lib/modules/Kernel-xxx/drivers/net/wireless/atmel_cs.c file with a line I found via Google and recompile the kernel.

It worked like a charm, and after that everything was fine. To hell with ATMEL's drivers.

Please post or email me the line thanks

To assist future visitors who may encounter the same issue, it is strongly preferred that any problem resolutions be posted publicly here at LQ rather than communicated via private Emails, because that way many people will benefit from the knowledge rather than just one. Thanks -- J.W.

This is a patchfile transcript for the code, but I didn't use it since the change is so brief.

Instead, I just used emacs to edit the lines and then recompiled.

--- linux.orig/drivers/net/wireless/atmel_cs.c
+++ linux/drivers/net/wireless/atmel_cs.c
@@ -350,6 +350,9 @@ static struct {

static struct device atmel_device = {
.bus_id = "pcmcia",
+ .kobj = {
+ .k_name = "atmel_cs"
+ }
};

static void atmel_config(dev_link_t *link)

Hopefully yours will work as easily as mine did. The most challenging thing was to get the kernel compiled and loaded properly - I was a real newbie to kernel hacking/compiling when I did this. Anyone can do it if you are unafraid.

Thanks for the follow-through davidbalt -- J.W.