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This is another driver for the Atmel AT76C503A based USB WLAN adapters. We are developing this driver in private. We are not associated with Atmel, or any cooperation that builds devices with this chip.
Currently, the driver has some limitations:
no promiscous, monitor or station mode and no support for libpcap, i.e. it does not work with Kismet or Airsnort and it cannot act as an WLAN access point. This is a restriction imposed by the current firmware.
The firmware for Intersil radios is old (Atmel doesn't update it anymore) and has more restrictions. See the chipsets page for more information.
Support for 2.6.x kernels is now in main tree (versions 0.13+). (see this page for more information)
It has been tested with the usb host controller drivers usb-uhci, uhci and usb-ohci. It also works with more than one adapter on one host.
Ensure you have kernel sources matching the kernel you want to compile for (incl. the correct configuration).
Get either the latest released driver source, 0.17, or the latest cvs tarball. A kernel 2.6.x support is in 0.16 already. Kernel 2.4 support is dropped in 0.13, please use 0.12 for it
Compile and install (as root):
make
make install
Plug the device in and watch the syslog; if you see lines like:
at76c503.c: device's MAC 00:08:a1:42:9c:d9, regulatory domain ETSI (Europe - (Spain+France) (id 48)
at76c503.c: registered wlan0
the driver started successfully.
Set the wireless parameters and open the netdevice:
iwconfig wlan0 essid your_ssid mode your_mode
ifconfig wlan0 your_ipaddr
Try to ping etc. your peer.
In case of any problems check the more extensive description.
This is my (J.A.) completely personal view:
This driver suppports Intersil radios (and will do so in the future) while the Sourceforge driver dropped it in December 2002 due to the Atmel company's support policy :-(.
It got a much clearer internal structure, so it is easier to maintain.
With the Berlios driver it's much easier to analyze problems described in the mailing lists due to the structured debug messages and the debug bit mask
The usbdfu part was written by Oliver and Alex with re-usability in mind - feel free to use it for other DFU class USB devices!
It tries to be endian clean for ports to big-endian machines.
No config script at compile time makes the user's life easier.
No proprietary config tool (like lvnet, xvnet), but full support for wireless extensions - both the config scripts of the main distributions and the graphical frontends based on WE work.
This driver got the problems with SMP kernels fixed (hopefully).
It hasn't got the usb-uhci problem.
Some mailing list postings report a higher throughput. YMMV.
The internal structure of the Sourceforge driver needed a complete rewrite which was IMHO not possible inside the Sourceforge project. Sorry for the confusion this second project caused for you.
WUSB11 v2.6 doesn't work with the 0.101.x RFMD firmware. You must switch back to 0.90.2-140 by editing the #include statement in at76c503-rfmd.c (open)
Re-loading the driver while the device stays powered on triggers the mis-leading error message
at76c503.c: load_ext_fw_block failed: -32, i = 0but this is no error. (fixed in 0.12beta1)
The driver fails before downloading the external firmware part. This was observed using usb-uhci (while uhci worked fine) with VIA USB host controllers (e.g. KT133, KT133A chipsets). The last line in syslog is
usbdfu.c: scanning unclaimed devices
The system is unharmed, but the driver doesn't continue. Using a cheap external USB hub helped in one case. (open)
If the device is disconnected during firmware download, the systems crashes with a kernel oops (driver version 0.12beta1, kernel 2.4.23) (open)
