more j820 hacking, not many fruits

[Faré]

Dear j820ers, 
 
I updated the source on CVS. It is now able again to build the latest
toolchain from uclibc. uclibc now uses Subversion instead of CVS, so
what we used to have was victim of bitrot. That no one noticed just
proves that no new hacker has been on the project for a while. I also
made some petty improvements to the build environment, and uploaded a
recent image to the web site. I realized that linux kernel 2.4 won't
build with gcc 3.4 or more recent. Oh well. As long as uclibc supports
3.3.5, we're safe. Hopefully, we'd get 2.6 running at some time (who
am I kidding?).
 
I also tried to get my DWL-650 revP running, and failed miserably.
With either hostap_cs (from hostap) or prism2_cs (from linux-wlan-ng),
I crash the kernel badly, though not entirely predictably: the screen
may flicker or fail; ultimately, the machine is locked; no error
message is displayed or saved. Looks like there's a race condition
somewhere, probably some conflict (bad locking/masking/reserving)
regarding interrupts or DMA, or maybe is trying something too
PC-specific (hopefully, the incompatibility doesn't lie in the
firmware). I haven't tried a serial console though. Of course an older
driver won't work because this recent chipset requires that I should
upload the firmware at runtime. I should probably resell this card,
and try to get an older one... or buy a new computer.
 
Finally, I tried to compile Linux 2.4.27-vrs1 instead of the one from
hh.org, and despite some tweaking, the result, while mostly stable,
still dies when I run cardmgr from debian. As long as I'm in the
ramdisk, it runs fine, and I remember that's a symptom we've had in
the past, but I'm incapable of determining what to fix. Maybe I should
try to mix-and-match parts of our hh.org based kernel with the vrs1
kernel until I locate the error. Sigh. Any taker? I'm getting tired of
this.
 
Kernel driver debugging is a truly horrible experience.
Compile-reboot-crash cycles. Sigh. I'm getting tired of Linux,
actually.

Best regards,

[ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only
exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from
the Public Treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for
the candidate promising the most benefits from the Public Treasury with
the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy
always followed by dictatorship."
   -- Alexander Fraser Tyler, "The Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic"