Hi all, i installed the madwifi driver for my netgear WG511T, reboot, it gets to the activating hardware detection /etc/rc.d/rc.hotplug and just stays there with a blinking cursor, the WG511T lights are blinking one at a time alternating. Does anyone have any suggestions on what i should try next? Ive already re-installed slackware 10.2 twice trying to get this wifi card going but no luck yet Sad Any help at all would be very appreciated.

You might want to have a look through syslog and messages (both in /var/log) and see if you can figure out what hotplug is trying to do when it hangs. Any messages hotplug is leaving might be helpful.

For some reason even with acpi off (upgraded to the 2.6.13.4 kernel) the madwifi driver didnt want to work, i tried the ndiswrapper driver for my card and after altering the rc.wireless.conf and rc.inet1.conf it was up and running

The 2.6.13.4 kernel seemed to fix the 4K_STACK problem, unless something else did it

I'm glad you got something working, but if you want to push on madwifi a little more, it should work in Slackware. When you compiled madwifi, did you use the madwifi.Slackbuild script?

Also, I'm curious about the 4K stack warnings. I haven't seen that happen on any of the stock Slackware kernels.

Ndiswrapper gives these (false) 4K stack warningw when compiling on a 2.6 kernel.

Eric

I did use the madwifi.Slackbuild script yeah. I might have to give it another go, do you know which one is "better" ?

I got the 4k stack warnings using the 2.6.13 generic kernel on cd 2 of slackware 10.2 but never got them using the 2.6.13.4

something went wrong with the ndiswrapper when doing "modprobe ndiswrapper" it makes the whole system hang. Anyone have any ideas on how to stop that happening?

I thought since ndiswrapper didnt seem to be working i'd give the madwifi driver another go. It seemed to install ok (no 4k stack errors) but when it came to loading the driver "modprobe ath_pci" the ath_pci module couldnt be found

Any ideas?

I haven't built madwifi since I can't use it, but my guess is that an available Slackware build script is likely to be a good starting place. Personally I think that a native linux driver has got to be a better deal than ndiswrapper, but then again, if you have a working card under ndiswrapper, it is hard to argue that you should change.

I've been doing a bit of digging into the 4K stacks issue, and it sounds like the kernel team has decided that it will be the default for kernels. However, you can change the options under kernel hacking if you are building your own. What makes no sense to me is that I recently compiled a 2.6.13.4 kernel for my server and looking at the config, it appears to be using 8K stacks. I know I didn't change that option so maybe the kernel team hasn't completely settled the issue and Slackware is using them on its own.

I had concluded as well that the 2.6 kernels that I build with Slackware (as well as the 2.6 kernels that ship with Slackware) have 8k stacks. You will have to explicitly enable 4k stacks in the kernel hacking section when configuring the kernel source tree.

Ndiswrapper's makefile just checks for the existence of the CONFIG_4KSTACKS parameter in the kernel source's .config (as I explained in this other thread) and when it does not find it, concludes incorrectly that your kernel uses 4k stacks.
Nothing to worry about (except that the ndiswrapper developers warn that many Windows NDIS drivers nowadays require even larger stack sizes (up to 32k) in order not to bring down your kernel after some time.

Try this madwifi.SlackBuild - maybe you've already used it, maybe not. Anyway, let us hear whether it helps you get your wireless card working.

Cheers, Eric

A 32K stack? Great, just what we all need, bloatware drivers........

Thanks for the explanation on how ndiswrapper determines if there are 4K stacks or not. That is very useful to know.